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Diskussionspapiere 2010 / 2022
Natural gas prices in Germany saw a strong increase at the end of 2021, subsequently worsening with the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, raising concerns about the distributional consequences. Our study shows that low-income households are affected the most by the natural gas price increase. Low-income households pay at the median 11.70 percent of their equivalent income on gas bills, ...
2022| Mats Kröger, Maximilian Longmuir, Karsten Neuhoff, Franziska Schütze
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Diskussionspapiere 2009 / 2022
We use the prolonged Greek crisis as a case study to understand how a lasting economic shock affects the innovation strategies of firms in economies with moderate innovation activities. Adopting the 3-stage CDM model, we explore the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity for different size groups of Greek manufacturing firms during the prolonged crisis. At the first stage, we find that the ...
2022| Ioannis Giotopoulos, Alexander S. Kritikos, Aggelos Tsakanikas
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Diskussionspapiere 2008 / 2022
This study investigates the effects of short-lived rent control regulations introduced in Catalonia in September 2020 and revoked in March 2022. Using the microdata of the largest Spanish housing advertisement portal idealista between January 2017 and May 2022, we analyze the dynamics of prices and supply for dwellings offered for rent and for sale. We also examine separately the rental and sales markets. ...
2022| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Fernando A. López, David Rey Blanco, Pelayo González Arbués
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Diskussionspapiere 2007 / 2022
We examine the medium-term impact of COVID-19 for financial well-being and technology adoption in a low-income country. The analysis is based on regionally representative panel data consisting of 1,975 micro-entrepreneurs from rural Uganda. Using a LASSO approach, we first show that several business characteristics predict longer business shutdown due to COVID-19, including running a service business. ...
2022| Jana Hamdan, Yuanwei Xu
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Diskussionspapiere 2006 / 2022
It is often argued that institutionalized after-school care (ASC) can benefit children lacking adequate homework support at home and, hence, foster equality of opportunity. However, despite considerable policy interest, it is unclear whether these afternoon programs are beneficial for child development and if selection into them is efficient, i.e., whether students benefiting most from the programs ...
2022| Laura Schmitz
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Diskussionspapiere 2005 / 2022
We propose a test for time-varying impulse responses in heteroskedastic structural vector autoregressions that can be used when the shocks are identified by external proxy variables as a group. The test can be used even if the shocks are not identified individually. The asymptotic analysis is supported by small sample simulations which show good properties of the test. An investigation of the impact ...
2022| Martin Bruns, Helmut Lütkepohl
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Diskussionspapiere 2004 / 2022
This paper revives the question of whether a temporary VAT change is an adequate instrument for crisis stabilization. In empirical assessments, we find that durable goods consumption fluctuates strongly over the business cycle and that VAT rate changes affect durable goods in particular. Therefore, we build a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model that is capable of addressing this major ...
2022| Marius Clemens, Werner Röger
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Diskussionspapiere 2003 / 2022
Steam coal exporters face increasing uncertainty about future coal demand and risks of asset stranding. Nevertheless, new export-oriented coal mine projects are still brought forward. In this study, we use the coal sector model COALMOD-World to assess the economic prospects of investments in the export-oriented steam coal sector, and in particular of coal mines in the Galilee Basin, Australia. We parameterize ...
2022| Christian Hauenstein, Franziska Holz, Lennart Rathje, Thomas Mitterecker
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Diskussionspapiere 2002 / 2022
We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...
2022| Marco Caliendo, Daniel Graeber, Alexander S. Kritikos, Johannes Seebauer
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Diskussionspapiere 2001 / 2022
To obtain a more complete understanding of the persisting gender earnings gap in Germany, this paper investigates both the cross-sectional and biographical dimension of gender inequalities. Using an Oaxaca Blinder decomposition, we show that the gender gap in annual earnings is largely driven by women’s lower work experience and intensive margin of labor supply. Based on a dynamic microsimulation model, ...
2022| Rick Glaubitz, Astrid Harnack-Eber, Miriam Wetter
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Diskussionspapiere 2000 / 2022
This paper sheds new light on the role of communication for cartel formation. Using machine learning to evaluate free-form chat communication among firms in a laboratory experiment, we identify typical communication patterns for both explicit cartel formation and indirect attempts to collude tacitly. We document that firms are less likely to communicate explicitly about price fixing and more likely ...
2022| Maximilian Andres, Lisa Bruttel, Jana Friedrichsen
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Diskussionspapiere 1999 / 2022
In 2020, Berlin introduced a rigorous rent-control policy responding to soaring rents by setting a cap on rental prices: the Mietendeckel (rent freeze). The policy was revoked one year later by the German Constitutional Court. Although successful in reducing rents during its duration, the consequences for Berlin’s rental market and adjacent municipalities are not clear. In this paper we evaluate the ...
2022| Anja M. Hahn, Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Sofie R. Waltl, Marco Fongoni
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Diskussionspapiere 1998 / 2022
Data is often at the core of digital products and services, especially when related to online advertising. This has made data protection and privacy a major policy concern. When surfing the web, consumers leave digital traces that can be used to build user profiles and infer preferences. We quantify the extent to which Facebook can track web behavior outside of their own platform. The network of engagement ...
2022| Luis Aguiar, Christian Peukert, Maximilian Schäfer, Hannes Ullrich
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Diskussionspapiere 1997 / 2022
Housing affordability is a hotly debated issue on global scale. A lack of affordable housing of decent quality is a chronic problem in urban areas. Governments try to alleviate it by stimulating homeownership among middle-income households and providing social housing for the low-income households. Such policies are very costly. Thus, this study aims to assess at least tentatively the effectiveness ...
2022| Eugeniya Malinskaya, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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Diskussionspapiere 1996 / 2022
A number of studies show that there is a link between social comparison and high levels of household debt. However, the exact mechanisms behind this link are not yet well understood. In this paper, we disentangle two mechanisms by performing a lab experiment designed to study the effects of social image concerns and peer information on consumption choices financed through debt taking. We find that ...
2022| Antonia Grohmann, Melanie Koch
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Diskussionspapiere 1995 / 2022
We develop a New Keynesian model with household heterogeneity and bounded rationality in the form of cognitive discounting. The interaction of household heterogeneity and bounded rationality generates amplification of monetary and fiscal policy through indirect general equilibrium effects while simultaneously ruling out the forward guidance puzzle and remaining stable at the effective lower bound. ...
2022| Oliver Pfäuti, Fabian Seyrich
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Diskussionspapiere 1994 / 2022
This study examines short-, medium-, and long-run price expectations in housing markets. We derive and test six hypothesis about the incidence, formation, and relevance of price expectations. To do so, we use data from a tailored household survey, past sale and rental offerings, satellites, and from an information RCT. As novel findings, we show that price expectations exhibit mean reversion in the ...
2022| Niklas Gohl, Peter Haan, Claus Michelsen, Felix Weinhardt
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Diskussionspapiere 1993 / 2022
This paper studies external sovereign bonds as an asset class. It compiles a new database of 266,000 monthly prices of foreign-currency government bonds traded in London and New York between 1815 (the Battle of Waterloo) and 2016, covering up to 91 countries. The main insight is that, as in equity markets, the returns on external sovereign bonds have been sufficiently high to compensate for risk. Real ...
2022| Josefin Meyer, Carmen M. Reinhart, Christoph Trebesch
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Diskussionspapiere 1992 / 2022
We investigate how internal distribution motives can interfere with the economic objectives of capital controls. In order to do this, we provide a model showing that elite capture can affect optimal debt repatriations and the management of official reserves under capital controls. Relying on these theoretical insights and a wealth of quantitative and qualitative historical evidence, we study one of ...
2022| Andrea Papadia, Claudio A. Schioppa
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Diskussionspapiere 1991 / 2022
Equivalence Scales are a tool for removing the heterogeneity of household sizes in the measurement of inequality, and affect poverty assessments and poverty lines. We address the disadvantage that poor households may suffer due to their reduced ability to share goods within the household. This disadvantage is important to estimate and embed in standard analysis, as it seems to have a substantial quantitative ...
2022| Christos Koulovatianos, Carsten Schröder