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DIW Discussion Papers 736 / 2007
Using data on annual individual labor income from three representative panel datasets (German SOEP, British BHPS, Australian HILDA) we investigate a) the selectivity of item non-response (INR) and b) the impact of imputation as a prominent post-survey means to cope with this type of measurement error on prototypical analyses (earnings inequality, mobility and wage regressions) in a cross-national setting. ...
2007| Joachim R. Frick, Markus M. Grabka
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DIW Discussion Papers 735 / 2007
This study suggests another explanation of the "missing globalization puzzle" typically observed in the empirical gravity models. In contrast to the previous research that focused on aggregated trade flows, we employ the trade flows in manufacturing products broken down by 25 three-digit ISIC Rev.2 categories. We estimate the distance coefficient using the log-linear specification of the standard as ...
2007| Boriss Siliverstovs, Dieter Schumacher
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DIW Discussion Papers 734 / 2007
Using representative micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the year 2002, we analyse non-take-up behaviour of Social Assistance (SA) in Germany. According to our simulation as much as 67 percent of the eligible population did not claim SA in that year which is slightly higher than reported in previous work. We particularly emphasize the role of measurement error in estimating ...
2007| Joachim R. Frick, Olaf Groh-Samberg
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DIW Discussion Papers 733 / 2007
Objectives - Taking a cross-national comparative perspective, we investigate linkages between volunteer work, informal helping, and caring among Europeans aged 50 or older: Is the relationship between these activities characterized by complementarity or by substitution? Is there evidence for the existence of (unobserved) personality traits that foster engagement independent of a specific activity? ...
2007| Karsten Hank, Stephanie Stuck
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DIW Discussion Papers 732 / 2007
In this paper, we present a detailed and comprehensive complementarity model for computing market equilibrium values in the European natural gas system. Market players include producers and their marketing arms which we call "transmitters", pipeline and storage operators, marketers, LNG liquefiers, regasifiers, tankers, and three end-use consumption sectors. The economic behavior of producers, transmitters, ...
2007| Ruud Egging, Steven A. Gabriel, Franziska Holz, Jifang Zhuang
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DIW Discussion Papers 731 / 2007
We consider a model of a monopolistic network operator who sequentially offers two-parted access charges to symmetric downstream firms. We are particularly interested in analyzing an alternative to current regulatory practice of prescribing access. In particular, we look at the possibility of restraining the input monopolist's market power by endowing downstream firms with a regulatory option: In case ...
2007| Claudia Salim
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DIW Discussion Papers 730 / 2007
In this paper we investigate the effects of EU enlargement on price convergence. The internal market is expected to boost integration and increase efficiency and welfare through a convergence of prices in product markets. Two principal drivers are crucial to explain price developments. On the one hand, higher competition exerts a downward pressure on prices because of lower mark ups. On the other hand, ...
2007| Christian Dreger, Konstantin Kholodilin, Kirsten Lommatzsch, Jiri Slacalek, Przemyslaw Wozniak
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DIW Discussion Papers 729 / 2007
The Kyoto Protocol is one first important step towards a global greenhouse gas emissions reduction strategy. In order to avoid irreversible climate changes and huge economic damage, not just some but all of the responsible nations should agree on a joint proposal to reduce emissions. Sharing the burden fairly would mean that those nations with high emissions per capita should reduce them more than ...
2007| Claudia Kemfert
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DIW Discussion Papers 728 / 2007
The telecommunications in the 1990s witnessed an enormous worldwide round of Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A). This paper examines the innovation determinants of M&A activity and the consequences of M&A transactions on the technological potential and the innovation performance. We examine the telecommunications equipment industry over the period 1988-2002 using a newly constructed data set with firm-level ...
2007| Tseveen Gantumur, Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 727 / 2007
Gender role attitudes are well-known determinants of female labor supply. This paper examines the strength of those attitudes using time diaries on childcare, food management and religious activities provided by the British Time Use Survey. Given the low labor force participation of females from ethnic minorities, the role of ethnicity in forming those attitudes and influencing time spent for "traditional" ...
2007| Anzelika Zaiceva, Klaus F. Zimmermann
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DIW Discussion Papers 726 / 2007
Immigrants are much less likely to own their homes than natives, even after controlling for a broad range of life-cycle and socio-economic characteristics and housing market conditions. This paper extends the analysis of immigrant housing tenure choice by explicitly accounting for ethnic identity as a potential influence on the homeownership decision, using a two-dimensional model of ethnic identity ...
2007| Amelie Constant, Rowan Roberts, Klaus F. Zimmermann
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DIW Discussion Papers 725 / 2007
We propose a new methodology for comparing poverty over multiple periods across time and space that does not arbitrarily aggregate income over various years or rely on arbitrarily specified poverty lines or poverty indices. Following Duclos et al. (2006a), we use the multivariate stochastic dominance methodology to create dominance surfaces for different time spans. We elaborate the method first for ...
2007| Johannes Gräb, Michael Grimm
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DIW Discussion Papers 724 / 2007
How individual wages change with time, and how they are expected to change as individuals grow older, is one of crucial determinants of their behaviour on the labour market including their decision to retire. The profile of individual hourly wages has for a long time been assumed to follow an "inverse-U" path, although there has been little work specifically concerning the age-wage profile and documenting ...
2007| Michal Myck
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DIW Discussion Papers 723 / 2007
This paper investigates predictions of Porter's Diamond model regarding the impact of locational factors on innovativeness and performance at the firm level. We formulate a structural equation model based on the relationships between locational conditions, e.g., transportation infrastructure, proximity to universities and research institutes, qualified labour, on the one hand, and innovativeness measured ...
2007| Alexander Eickelpasch, Anna Lejpras, Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 722 / 2007
German chemical manufacturing industry is marked by two major structural changes during 1992-2004. Firstly, number of firms was ranging extensively: from 676 to 901, while only 96 firms represented balanced panel. Secondly, size of the firm dropped considerably-by 88%. This paper is intended to shed light on both phenomena. Based on reliable census data analysis suggests the former evidence be explained ...
2007| Oleg Badunenko
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DIW Discussion Papers 721 / 2007
The paper advocates for a new measure of the ethnic identity of migrants, models its determinants and explores its explanatory power for various types of their economic performance. The ethnosizer, a measure of the intensity of a person's ethnic identity, is constructed from information on the following elements: language, culture, societal interaction, history of migration, and ethnic self-identification. ...
2007| Amelie Constant, Klaus F. Zimmermann
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DIW Discussion Papers 720 / 2007
This paper studies the productivity impact of heterogeneous capital inputs of selected EU-15 member countries and of the U.S. at the macroeconomic level. The stochastic possibility frontiers approach of Battese and Coelli (1992) applied here is used to identify neutralities or non-neutralities between different heterogeneous capital and labor inputs. Owing to the introduction and estimation of two-stage ...
2007| Georg Erber, Reinhard Madlener
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DIW Discussion Papers 719 / 2007
Using individual based micro-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), I analyze the cyclicality of real wages for male workers within employer-employee matches over the period 1984-2004, and compare different wage measures: the standard hourly wage rate, hourly wage earnings including overtime and bonus payments, and the effective wage, which takes into account not only paid overtime, ...
2007| Silke Anger
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DIW Discussion Papers 718 / 2007
The economic literature has largely overlooked the importance of repeat and circular migration. The paper studies this behavior by analyzing the number of exits and the total number of years away from the host country using count data models and panel data from Germany. More than 60% of migrants from the guestworker countries are indeed repeat or circular migrants. Migrants from European Union member ...
2007| Amelie Constant, Klaus F. Zimmermann
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DIW Discussion Papers 717 / 2007
The local business tax as the main revenue source of local governments in Germany has been under extensive debate for decades. Proposals for reform range from a broad tax base in the sense of an origin-based value-added tax to a pure profit tax that could be implemented as a surcharge on corporation and personal income tax. Local business taxation systems in OECD countries actually represent the whole ...
2007| Frank M. Fossen, Stefan Bach