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DIW Discussion Papers 455 / 2004
Economically active people are either in gainful employment, are unemployed or self-employed. We are interested in the dynamics of the transitions between these states across the business cycle. It is generally perceived that employment or self-employment are absorbing states. However, innovations, structural changes and business cycles generate strong adjustment processes that lead to fluctuations ...
2004| Amelie Constant, Klaus F. Zimmermann
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DIW Discussion Papers 454 / 2004
During the last years, the developing regions have come under increased pressure by the developed countries, in particular the USA, to join the international effort in global greenhouse gas abatement. On the one hand, the participation of the developing regions would offer the developed world with low cost opportunities for abatement. On the other hand,the economies of some developed regions such as ...
2004| Claudia Kemfert, Hans Kremers
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DIW Discussion Papers 453 / 2004
This paper analyzes the distribution of technical efficiency within manufacturing industries. Using a representative sample of 35,000 firms in 255 industries of the German cost structure census, technical efficiencies are estimated by applying a deterministic frontier production function with firmspecific fixed effects. A new measure is also introduced for characterizing the extent of heterogeneity ...
2004| Michael Fritsch, Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 452 / 2004
Some people believe that the impact of population ageing on future health care ex-penditures will be quite moderate due to the high costs of dying. If not age per se but proximity to death determines the bulk of expenditures, a shift in the mortality risk to higher ages will not affect lifetime health care expenditures as death occurs only once in every life. We attempt to take this effect into account ...
2004| Friedrich Breyer, Stefan Felder
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DIW Discussion Papers 451 / 2004
East German wages have been below the West German wage level since unification. Moreover, the East-West wage gap implied by the contractual wages specified in collective wage agreements is drifting ever further apart from the wagegap in terms of effective wages. This paper looks at the role of establishment-specific factors - such as sectoral affiliation and size of the labour force - in this process. ...
2004| Bernd Görzig, Martin Gornig, Axel Werwatz
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DIW Discussion Papers 450 / 2004
That partisanship is bounded. Almost every West German, East German and immigrant never supports one or both of the major parties and most people vary support for their party by claiming no partisan preference. Hardly anyone ever selects each of the parties at different points in time. Immediate social networks join with social class and religious factors to structure partisanship. The same social ...
2004| Alan S. Zuckerman, Martin Kroh
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DIW Discussion Papers 449 / 2004
This paper explores the relationship between two well-established con-cepts of measuring individual well-being: the concept of happiness, i.e. self-reported level of satisfaction with income and life, and relative deprivation/satisfaction, i.e. the gaps between the individual's income and the incomes of all individuals richer/poorer than him. Operationalizing both concepts using micro panel data from ...
2004| Conchita D'Ambrosio, Joachim R. Frick
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DIW Discussion Papers 448 / 2004
We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and the British Household Panel Survey to estimate the extent of intergenerational economic mobility in a framework that highlights the role played by assortative mating. We find that assortative mating plays an important role. On average about 40-50 percent of the covariancebetween parents' and own permanent family income can be attributed to the person ...
2004| John Ermisch, Marco Francesconi, Thomas Siedler
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DIW Discussion Papers 447 / 2004
Private paid tutoring is a subject that is not well recognised in education research. By using theories on educational choice one could argue that tutoring promotes inequalities in attaining qualifications. Empirical analyses based on the German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP) show that more than every fourth pupil has had private remedial teaching while attending school. In West Germany, paid lessons ...
2004| Thorsten Schneider
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DIW Discussion Papers 446 / 2004
The impact of parents' education and social position on their children's educational career is very well known for Germany. However, there is little research on the influence of parental income. The costs of longer-lasting school tracks and the financial opportunities of the parents are crucial in models on educational choice. This article examines the connection between income and school tracking, ...
2004| Thorsten Schneider
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DIW Discussion Papers 445 / 2004
We study the political economy of commuting subsidies in a model of a mono-centric city with two income classes. Depending on housing demand and transport costs, either the rich or the poor live in the central city and the other group in the suburbs. Commuting subsidies increase the net income of those with long commutes or high transport costs. They also affect land rents and therefore the income ...
2004| Rainald Borck, Matthias Wrede
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DIW Discussion Papers 444 / 2004
We evaluate the effect of the federal students' financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates into higher education by exploiting the exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in the repayment regulations. Supported students had to repay the full loan until 1990. Thereafter, 50 percent of the student aid has been offered as a non-repayable grant. Our results from simple difference-in-difference ...
2004| Hans J. Baumgartner, Viktor Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 443 / 2004
This paper investigates the link between the optimal level of nonfinancial firms' leverage and macroeconomic uncertainty. We develop a structural model of a firm's value maximization problem that predicts that as macroeconomic un-certainty increases the firm will decrease its optimal level of borrowing. We test this proposition using a panel of non{financial US firms drawn from the COM-PUSTAT quarterly ...
2004| Christopher F. Baum, Andreas Stephan, Oleksandr Talavera
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DIW Discussion Papers 442 / 2004
Incomplete data is a common problem of survey research. Recent work on multiple imputation techniques has increased analysts' awareness of the biasing effects of missing data and has also provided a convenient solution. Imputation methods replace non-response with estimates of the unobserved scores. In many instances, however, non-response to a stimulus does not result from measurement problems that ...
2004| Martin Kroh
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DIW Discussion Papers 441 / 2004
This paper presents two new tools for the identification of faking interviewers in surveys. One method is based on Benford's Law, and the other exploits the empirical observation that fakers most often produce answers with less variability than could be expected from the whole survey. We focus on fabricated data, which were taken out of the survey before the data were disseminated in the German Socio-Economic ...
2004| Christin Schäfer, Jörg-Peter Schräpler, Klaus-Robert Müller, Gert G. Wagner
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DIW Discussion Papers 440 / 2004
This article analyses the reform process in the European and the German natural gas sector. Competition in the industry and intra-European trade have been underdeveloped thus far. We argue that the European gas pipelines are a monopolistic bottleneck that require some form of access regulation, e.g. in the form of an Entry-Exit System. We discuss how regulation should be implemented at the European ...
2004| Christian von Hirschhausen, Thorsten Beckers
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DIW Discussion Papers 439 / 2004
While surveying measured weight is widely unpractical in national samples, self-reported weight is a simple and inexpensive method of collecting data. This paper deals with data quality of reported body weight in the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP). Previous research shows that data on reported body weight are plagued by systematic misreporting. This bias is said to be the consequence of the ...
2004| Martin Kroh
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DIW Discussion Papers 438 / 2004
We analyze the work incentives and labor supply effects of the so-called mini-jobs reform (subsidies of social security contributions to people with low-earnings jobs) introduced in Germany in April 2003. The analysis is based on a structural labor supply model embedded in a detailed tax-benefit microsimulation model for which we use the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Our simulation results show ...
2004| Viktor Steiner, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 437 / 2004
This paper investigates empirically the link between international outsourcing and the skill structure of labour demand in the United Kingdom. It is the first detailed study of this issue for the UK. Outsourcing is calculated using import-use matrices of input-output tables for manufacturing industries for the period 1982 to 1996. Estimating a system of variable factor demands, our main results show ...
2004| Alexander Hijzen, Holger Görg, Robert C. Hine
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DIW Discussion Papers 436 / 2004
This paper compares the outcomes of corporate self-regulation and traditional ex-ante regulation of network access to monopolistic bottlenecks. In the model of self-regulation, the domestic gas supplier and network owner and the monopsonistic gas customer fix quantities and the network access price, whereas the competitive fringe of foreign gas producers (third party) and the household customers are ...
2004| Georg Meran, Christian von Hirschhausen