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Diskussionspapiere 2108 / 2025
In conventional proxy VAR analysis, the shocks of interest are identified by external instruments. This is typically accomplished by considering the covariance of the instruments and the reduced-form residuals. Alternatively, the instruments may be internalized by augmenting the VAR process by the instruments or proxies. These alternative identification methods are compared and it is shown that the ...
2025| Martin Bruns, Helmut Lütkepohl
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Diskussionspapiere 2107 / 2025
The article documents the construction of a narrative instrument for government investment, used in the paper ‘An Estimation and Decomposition of the Government Investment Multiplier’.
2025| Marius Clemens, Claus Michelsen, Malte Rieth
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Diskussionspapiere 2106 / 2025
We construct a narrative instrument for government investment from official records in Germany. Using structural vector autoregressions, we document a significant crowding-in of private investment and an output multiplier of roughly 2. Then, we match a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to the empirical responses, and we decompose the multiplier into three channels. Public investment ...
2025| Marius Clemens, Claus Michelsen, Malte Rieth
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Diskussionspapiere 2105 / 2024
German history over the past 125 years has been turbulent. Marked by two world wars, revolutions and major regime changes, as well as a hyperinflation and three currency reforms, expropriations and territorial divisions, it comprises extreme shocks to study the role of historical events, taxation, asset price changes, portfolio heterogeneity in affecting the wealth distribution in the long run. Combining ...
2024| Thilo N. H. Albers, Charlotte Bartels, Moritz Schularick
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Diskussionspapiere 2104 / 2024
This study examines how student aid eligibility influences application decisions to higher education using administrative data from France. We study the impact of a change in income thresholds for aid eligibility. We find that aid eligibility did not have a uniform effect on students’ applications but varied by gender and academic performance. Highperforming male students shifted their First-Ranked ...
2024| Camille Remigereau, Clara Schäper
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Diskussionspapiere 2103 / 2024
A central assumption for identifying structural shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) models via heteroskedasticity is the time-invariance of the impact effects of the shocks. It is shown how that assumption can be tested when long-run restrictions are available for identifying structural shocks. The importance of performing such tests is illustrated by investigating the impact of fundamental shocks ...
2024| Martin Bruns, Helmut Lütkepohl
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Diskussionspapiere 2102 / 2024
This paper analyzes the distribution and composition of pre-tax national income in Germany since 1992, combining personal income tax returns, household survey data, and national accounts. Inequality rose from the 1990s to the late 2000s due to falling labor incomes among the bottom 50% and rising incomes in the top 10%. This trend reversed after 2007 as labor incomes across the bottom 90% increased. ...
2024| Stefan Bach, Charlotte Bartels, Theresa Neef
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Diskussionspapiere 2101 / 2024
Promoting fathers to take parental leave is seen as a promising way to advancegender equality. However, there is still a very limited understanding of its impact on fathers’ labor market outcomes. We conducted a correspondence study to analyze whether fathers who take parental leave face discrimination during the hiring process in three different occupations. Fathers who took parental leave in a female-dominated ...
2024| Julia Schmieder, Doris Weichselbaumer, Clara Welteke, Katharina Wrohlich
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Diskussionspapiere 2100 / 2024
Using a data-driven approach to identify structural vector autoregressive models, we examine key factors influencing the US dollar exchange rate across eight advanced economies from 1980 to 2022. We find that shocks to inflation expectations, which are closely tied to unfunded government transfer payments, have a pronounced effect on the US dollar’s value. This underscores the fiscal dimension of exchange ...
2024| Kerstin Bernoth, Helmut Herwartz, Lasse Trienens
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Diskussionspapiere 2099 / 2024
Child penalties in labour market outcomes are well-documented: after childbirth, mothers’ employment and earnings drop persistently compared to fathers. Beyond gender norms, a potential driver could be the loss in labour market skills due to mothers’ longer employment interruptions. This paper estimates child penalties in adult cognitive skills by adapting the pseudo-panel approach to a single cross-section ...
2024| Jonas Jessen, Lavinia Kinne, Michele Battisti
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Diskussionspapiere 2098 / 2024
We provide novel evidence about the incentive and welfare effects of an increase in the generosity of disability benefits. Importantly, a unique policy variation in Germany allows us to isolate the income effect of a change in benefit generosity. We leverage this quasi-experimental policy variation using an RD design to estimate the effect of increasing disability benefits on employment, earnings, ...
2024| Sebastian Becker, Annica Gehlen, Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan
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Diskussionspapiere 2097 / 2024
Theory suggests that corporate and sovereign bonds are fundamentally different, also because sovereign debt has no bankruptcy mechanism and is hard to enforce. We show empirically that the two assets are more similar than you think, at least when it comes to high-yield bonds over the past 20 years. Based on rich new data we compare risky US corporate bonds (“junk” bonds) to risky emerging market sovereign ...
2024| Gita Gopinath, Josefin Meyer, Carmen Reinhart, Christoph Trebesch
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Diskussionspapiere 2096 / 2024
The price for institutional long-term care is a central determinant of the demand for formal and informal long-term care. In this paper, we show how macroeconomic conditions affect these prices. The analysis is based on administrative data that contains rich information on the universe of nursing homes and ambulatory care services and about all recipients of long-term care benefits in Germany. For ...
2024| Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan, Mia Teschner
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Diskussionspapiere 2095 / 2024
The shocks in structural vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis are typically assumed to be instantaneously uncorrelated. This condition may easily be violated in proxy VAR models if more than one shock is identified by a proxy variable. Correlated shocks may be obtained even if the proxies are uncorrelated and satisfy the usual relevance and exogeneity conditions individually. Examples from the recent ...
2024| Martin Bruns, Helmut Lütkepohl, James McNeil
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Diskussionspapiere 2094 / 2024
Urban areas confront a chronic shortage of housing, especially in the low-rent segment. This precarious situation is further exacerbated by major challenges, like the destruction of housing by wars and natural catastrophes, rapid increase of demand, or pandemics cutting incomes. In response, the authorities implement rent control that slows rent increases or even freezes rents. Rent control is ubiquitous, ...
2024| Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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Diskussionspapiere 2093 / 2024
This paper investigates the perspectives of stakeholder groups in the plastic and steel value chains on transitioning toward a circular economy (CE). Through semistructured interviews with 31 business stakeholders, we analyze business strategies, key factors, challenges and opportunities, as well as coordination and regulatory needs for a successful industry-wide CE transition. Our findings highlight ...
2024| Xi Sun, Sophie M. Behr, Merve Kücük
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Diskussionspapiere 2092 / 2024
Public support systems and private investments in renewable energy are increasingly existing side-by-side and are both emphasized in policy proposals on the European and national levels. This paper assesses the interaction between the two approaches with respect to cream-skimming, i.e., the potential for low-cost projects to sign private contracts that increase the costs of publicly supported renewable ...
2024| Mats Kröger
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Diskussionspapiere 2091 / 2024
Tracking online user behavior is essential for targeted advertising and is at the heart of the business model of major online platforms. We analyze tracker-specific web browsing data to show how the prediction quality of consumer profiles varies with data size and scope. We find decreasing returns to the number of observed users and tracked websites. However, prediction quality increases considerably ...
2024| Hannes Ullrich, Jonas Hannane, Christian Peukert, Luis Aguiar, Tomaso Duso
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Diskussionspapiere 2090 / 2024
We discuss the main Theories of Harm in EU merger control and their evolution since the 1990s. We present stylised facts and trends using data extracted from EU merger decisions by natural language processing tools. EU merger policy has adapted over time, both in terms of legislation and theories of harm, as well as in terms of the investigative tools and evidence used. The introduction of the new ...
2024| Tomaso Duso, Lea Bernhardt, Joanna Piechucka
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Diskussionspapiere 2089 / 2024
This paper first shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the European Central Bank (ECB) can influence global energy prices. Second, through Lucas critique-robust counterfactual analysis, we uncover that the ECB’s ability to affect fast-moving energy prices plays an important role in the transmission of monetary policy. Third, we empirically document that, to optimally fulfill its primary mandate, ...
2024| Gökhan Ider, Alexander Kriwoluzky, Frederik Kurcz, Ben Schumann