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DIW Discussion Papers 676 / 2007
This paper examines how policy affects social expenditures. Analyzing an OECD panel from 1980 to 2003, five political variables are tested: Election- and pre-election years, the ideological party composition of the governments, the number of coalition partners and the fact, if the ruling government has a majority in parliament or not (minority government). I find that neither of these variables have ...
2007| Niklas Potrafke
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DIW Discussion Papers 675 / 2007
This study develops a parsimonious stable coefficient money demand model for Estonia for the period from 1995 till 2006. Using the Johansen Full Information Maximum Likelihood framework the two cointegrating vectors are found among the system variables including the real money balances, the gross domestic product, the long- and short-term interest rates, and the rate of inflation. The first cointegrating ...
2007| Boriss Siliverstovs
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DIW Discussion Papers 674 / 2007
Using unit labor cost (ULC) data from Euro area countries as well as US States and German Länder we investigate inflation convergence using different approaches, namely panel unit root tests, co-integration tests and error-correction models. All in all we cannot reject convergence of ULC growth in EMU, however, country-specific deviations from the rest of the currency union are more pronounced in Europe ...
2007| Sebastian Dullien, Ulrich Fritsche
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DIW Discussion Papers 673 / 2007
This paper explores the determinants of individual well-being as measured by self-reported levels of satisfaction with income. Making full use of the panel data nature of the German Socio-Economic Panel, we provide empirical evidence for well-being depending on absolute and on relative levels of income in a dynamic framework. This finding holds after controlling for other influential factors in a multivariate ...
2007| Conchita D'Ambrosio, Joachim R. Frick
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DIW Discussion Papers 672 / 2007
The definition and operationalization of wealth information in population surveys and the corresponding microdata requires a wide range of more or less normative assumptions. However, the decisions made in both the pre- and post-data-collection stage may interfere consid-erably with the substantive research question. Looking at wealth data from the German SOEP, this paper focuses on the impact of ...
2007| Joachim R. Frick, Markus M. Grabka, Eva M. Sierminska
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DIW Discussion Papers 671 / 2007
Turning unemployment into self-employment has become a major focus of German active labour market policy (ALMP) in recent years. If effective, this would not only reduce Germany's persistently high unemployment rate, but also increase its notoriously low self-employment rate. Empirical evidence on the effectiveness of such programmes is scarce. The contribution of the present paper is twofold: first, ...
2007| Hans J. Baumgartner, Marco Caliendo
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DIW Discussion Papers 670 / 2007
This paper extends previous research about the determinants of reservation wages by analysing the effect of progressive income taxation on the ratio between reservation and net market wages. Based on micro data for Germany (SOEP) we show that joint income taxation in Germany which discriminates by marital status, has a strong and highly significant impact on the reservation/market wage ratio. Relative ...
2007| Marco Caliendo, Ludovica Gambaro, Peter Haan
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DIW Discussion Papers 669 / 2007
In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in post-war German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. One central aim of this tax reform was to improve work incentives and, thereby, foster employment. In this paper, I estimate an intertemporal discrete choice model of female labor supply that allows to analyze the behavioral effects of the tax reform ...
2007| Peter Haan
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DIW Discussion Papers 668 / 2007
Energy is an important commodity in many economic activities. Its usage affects the environment via CO2 emissions and the Greenhouse Effect. Modeling the energy-economy-environment-trade linkages is an important objective in applied economic policy analysis. Previously, however, the modeling of these linkages in GTAP has been incomplete. This is because energy substitution, a key factor in this chain ...
2007| Truong P. Truong, Claudia Kemfert, Jean-Marc Burniaux
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DIW Discussion Papers 667 / 2007
Inflation differentials in the Euro area are mainly due to a sustained divergence of wage developments across the Euro area, and narrower differences in labour productivity growth (Alvarez et al., 2006). We investigate convergence of inflation using unit labour cost (ULC) growth and applying PANIC (Bai and Ng, 2004) and cluster procedures (Hobijn and Franses, 2000, Busetti et al., 2006) to Euro area ...
2007| Ulrich Fritsche, Vladimir Kuzin
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DIW Discussion Papers 666 / 2007
Recent years have witnessed a rise in right-wing extremism among German youth and young adults. This paper investigates the extent to which the experience of parental unemployment during childhood affects young people's far right-wing attitudes and xenophobia. Estimates from three German data sets show a positive relationship between growing up with unemployed parents and right-wing extremism, with ...
2007| Thomas Siedler
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DIW Discussion Papers 665 / 2007
This paper examines whether schooling has a positive impact on individual's political interest, voting turnout, democratic values, political involvement and political group membership, using the German General Social Survey (ALLBUS). Between 1949 and 1969 the number of compulsory years of schooling was increased from eight to nine years in the Federal Republic of Germany, gradually over time and across ...
2007| Thomas Siedler
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DIW Discussion Papers 664 / 2007
In this paper, we make multi-step forecasts of the annual growth rates of the real GDP for each of the 16 German Länder (states) simultaneously. Beside the usual panel data models, such as pooled and fixed-effects models, we apply panel models that explicitly account for spatial dependence between regional GDP. We find that both pooling and accounting for spatial effects helps substantially improve ...
2007| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Boriss Siliverstovs, Stefan Kooths
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DIW Discussion Papers 663 / 2007
We propose a generalized estimating equations approach to the analysis of the mean and the covariance structure of a bivariate time series process of panel data with mixed continuous and discrete dependent variables. The approach is used to jointly analyze wage dynamics and the incidence of profit-sharing in West Germany. Our findings reveal a significantly positive conditional correlation of wages ...
2007| Markus Pannenberg, Martin Spieß
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DIW Discussion Papers 662 / 2007
We develop a structural multi-factor labour demand model which distinguishes between eight labour categories including non-standard types of employment such as marginal employment. The model is estimated for both the number of workers and total working hours using a new panel data set. For unskilled and skilled workers in full-time employment, we find labour demand elasticities similar to previous ...
2007| Ronny Freier, Viktor Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 661 / 2007
This paper contributes to the policy-relevant question whether self-employment is a way out of (long-term) unemployment. We estimate the relationship between the entry rate into self-employment and previous (long-term) unemployment on the basis of pseudo-panel data for Germany in the period 1996-2002. The estimation method accounts for cohort fixed effects and measurement errors induced by the pseudo ...
2007| Daniela Glocker, Viktor Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 660 / 2007
We analyse how money as a store of value affects the decisions of a representative household under diversifiable and non-diversifiable risks given that the central bank successfully stabilizes the rate of inflation at a low level. Assuming exponential utility allows us to derive an explicit relationship between optimal money holdings, the household's desire to tilt, smooth and stabilize consumption ...
2007| Ingrid Größl, Ulrich Fritsche
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DIW Discussion Papers 659 / 2007
Matching has become a popular approach to estimate average treatment effects. It is based on the conditional independence or unconfoundedness assumption. Checking the sensitivity of the estimated results with respect to deviations from this identifying assumption has become an increasingly important topic in the applied evaluation literature. If there are unobserved variables which affect assignment ...
2007| Sascha O. Becker, Marco Caliendo
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DIW Discussion Papers 658 / 2006
The paper investigates the role of social norms as a determinant of individual attitudes by analyzing risk proclivity reported by immigrants and natives in a unique representative German survey. We employ factor analysis to construct measures of immigrants' ethnic persistence and assimilation. The estimated effect of these measures on risk proclivity suggests that adaptation to the attitudes of the ...
2006| Holger Bonin, Amelie Constant, Konstantinos Tatsiramos, Klaus F. Zimmermann
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DIW Discussion Papers 657 / 2006
This paper uses the concept of ethnic self-identification of immigrants in a twodimensional framework. It acknowledges the fact that attachments to the home and the host country are not necessarily mutually exclusive. There are three possible paths of adjustment from separation at entry, namely the transitions to assimilation, integration and marginalization. We analyze the determinants of ethnic selfidentification ...
2006| Laura Zimmermann, Klaus F. Zimmermann, Amelie Constant