-
DIW Discussion Papers 977 / 2010
This paper examines the process of price discovery in the MTS system, which builds on the parallel quoting of euro-denominated government securities on a number of (relatively large) domestic markets and on a (relatively small) European marketplace (EuroMTS). Using twenty-seven months of daily data for 107 pairs of bonds, we present unambiguous evidence that trades on EuroMTS have a sizeable informational ...
2010| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Alessandro Girardi
-
DIW Discussion Papers 976 / 2010
In the Copenhagen Accord of December 2009, developed countries agreed to provide start-up finance for adaptation in developing countries and expressed the ambition to scale this up to $100 billion per year by 2020. The financial mechanisms to deliver this support have to be tailored to country and sector specific needs so as to enable domestic policy processes and self sustaining business models, and ...
2010| Karsten Neuhoff, Sam Fankhauser, Emmanuel Guerin, Jean Charles Hourcade, Helen Jackson, Ranjita Rajan, John Ward
-
DIW Discussion Papers 975 / 2010
This paper focuses on nominal exchange rates, specifically the US dollar rate vis-à-vis the Euro and the Japanese Yen at a daily frequency. We model both absolute values of returns and squared returns using long-memory techniques, being particularly interested in volatility modelling and forecasting given their importance for FOREX dealers. Compared with previous studies using a standard fractional ...
2010| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana
-
DIW Discussion Papers 974 / 2010
This paper focuses on gender differences in the role played by locus of control within a model that predicts outcomes for men and women at two opposite poles of the labour market: high level managerial / leadership positions and unemployment. Based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we investigated the extent to which gender differences occur in the processes by which highly positive and ...
2010| Eileen Trzcinski, Elke Holst
-
DIW Discussion Papers 973 / 2010
The global imbalances of the 2000s and the recent global financial crisis are intimately connected. Both originate in the combination of economic policies adopted by the two key economies, the US and China. Global financial markets served as a transmission belt, both during the boom as during the bust. In the US, the interaction among the Fed's monetary stance, global real interest rates, distorted ...
2010| Ansgar Belke, Daniel Gros
-
DIW Discussion Papers 972 / 2010
We assess differences that emerge in Taylor rule estimations for the Fed and the ECB before and after the start of the subprime crisis. For this purpose, we apply an explicit estimate of the equilibrium real interest rate and of potential output in order to account for variations within these variables over time. We argue that measures of money and credit growth, interest rate spreads and asset price ...
2010| Ansgar Belke, Jens Klose
-
DIW Discussion Papers 971 / 2010
This paper examines the interactions between money, interest rates, goods and commodity prices at a global level. For this purpose, we aggregate data for major OECD countries and follow the Johansen/Juselius cointegrated VAR approach. Our empirical model supports the view that, when controlling for interest rate changes and thus different monetary policy stances, money (defined as a global liquidity ...
2010| Ansgar Belke, Ingo G. Bordon, Torben W. Hendricks
-
DIW Discussion Papers 970 / 2010
This study utilizes the dynamic factor model of Giannone et al. (2008) in order to make now-/forecasts of GDP quarter-on-quarter growth rates in Switzerland. It also assesses the informational content of macroeconomic data releases for forecasting of the Swiss GDP. We find that the factor model offers a substantial improvement in forecast accuracy of GDP growth rates compared to a benchmark naive constant-growth ...
2010| Boriss Siliverstovs, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
-
DIW Discussion Papers 969 / 2010
In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's expectation about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. Recent experimental studies as well as surveys have asked participants to state their beliefs explicitly, but little is known about the causal relation between beliefs and other behavioral variables. This paper discusses the possibility of creating exogenous ...
2010| Miguel A. Costa-Gomes, Steffen Huck, Georg Weizsäcker
-
DIW Discussion Papers 968 / 2010
This paper examines how delivery tariffs and private quality standards are determined in vertical relations that are subject to asymmetric information. We consider an infinitely repeated game where an upstream firm sells a product to a downstream firm. In each period, the firms negotiate a delivery contract comprising the quality of the good as well as a non-linear tariff. Assuming asymmetric information ...
2010| Pio Baake, Vanessa von Schlippenbach
-
DIW Discussion Papers 967 / 2009
The generosity of the Unemployment Insurance system (UI) plays a central role for the job search behavior of unemployed individuals. Standard search theory predicts that an increase in UI benefit generosity, either in terms of benefit duration or entitlement, has a negative impact on the job search activities of the unemployed increasing their unemployment duration. Despite the disincentive effect ...
2009| Marco Caliendo, Konstantinos Tatsiramos, Arne Uhlendorff
-
DIW Discussion Papers 966 / 2009
When unemployed persons go into business, they often are characterized as necessity entrepreneurs, because push factors, namely their unemployment, likely prompted their decision. In contrast to this, business founders who have been previously employed represent opportunity entrepreneurs because pull factors provide the rationale for their decision. However, a data set of nearly 1,900 business start-ups ...
2009| Marco Caliendo, Alexander S. Kritikos
-
DIW Discussion Papers 965 / 2009
Economic reasons along with cultural affinities and the existence of networks have been the main determinants explaining migration flows between home and host countries. This paper reconsiders these approaches combined with the gravity model and empirically tests the hypothesis that ex-colonial links can still play an important role in the emigration decision. We employ a general linear mixed model, ...
2009| Amelie F. Constant, Bienvenue N. Tien
-
DIW Discussion Papers 964 / 2009
This chapter investigates the integration processes of immigrants in Germany by comparing certain immigrant groups to natives differentiating by gender and immigrant generation. Indicators which are supposed to capture cultural integration of immigrants are differences in marital behavior as well as language abilities, ethnic identification and religious distribution. A special feature of the available ...
2009| Amelie F. Constant, Olga Nottmeyer, Klaus F. Zimmermann
-
DIW Discussion Papers 963 / 2009
This paper is based on recently collected and rich survey data of a representative sample of entrants into unemployment in Germany. Our data include a large number of migration variables, allowing us to adapt a recently developed concept of ethnic identity: the ethnosizer. To shed further light on the native-migrant differences in economic outcomes, we investigate the labor market reintegration, patterns ...
2009| Amelie Constant, Martin Kahanec, Ulf Rinne, Klaus F. Zimmermann
-
DIW Discussion Papers 962 / 2009
This paper provides an empirical demonstration for a practical approach of efficiency evaluation against the background of limited data availability in some regulated industries. Here, traditional DEA may result in a lack of discriminatory power when high numbers of variables but only limited observations are available. We apply PCA-DEA for radial efficiency measurement to US natural gas transmission ...
2009| Maria Nieswand, Astrid Cullmann, Anne Neumann
-
DIW Discussion Papers 961 / 2009
We analyze the choices between two technologies A and B that both exhibit network effects. We introduce a critical mass game in which coordination on either one of the standards constitutes a Nash equilibrium outcome while coordination on standard B is assumed to be payoff-dominant. We present a heuristic definition of a critical mass and show that the critical mass is inversely related to the mixed ...
2009| Claudia Keser, Irina Suleymanova, Christian Wey
-
DIW Discussion Papers 960 / 2009
We analyze the technical efficiency of German and Swiss urban public transport companies by means of SFA. In transport networks we might face different network structures or complexities, not observed, but influencing the production process. The unobserved factors are typically modeled as separable factors. However, we argue that the entire production process is organized around different network structures. ...
2009| Astrid Cullmann, Mehdi Farsi, Massimo Filippini
-
DIW Discussion Papers 959 / 2009
We provide the description and illustrative results of the World Gas Model, a multi-period complementarity model for the global natural gas market. Market players include producers, traders, pipeline and storage operators, LNG liquefiers and regasifiers as well as marketers. The model data set contains more than 80 countries and regions and covers 98% of world wide natural gas production and consumption. ...
2009| Ruud Egging, Franziska Holz, Steven A. Gabriel
-
DIW Discussion Papers 958 / 2009
Der vorliegende Beitrag ist eine Metaanalyse von 99 deutschen Bevölkerungssurveys aus dem GESIS-Datenarchiv, in denen die postmaterialistische Einstellung der Befragten ermittelt wird. Es wird anhand von Mehrebenenmodellen gezeigt, dass sich der Anteil der Postmaterialisten unter Kontrolle von Geburtsjahr der Befragten und Erhebungsjahr des Surveys überzufällig zwischen den Surveys unterscheidet. Diese ...
2009| Jan Marcus