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DIW Discussion Papers 1897 / 2020
We estimate effects of center-based care on parenting activities using time use data for Germany. Our estimates imply that center-based care reduces the overall time that parents spend with the enrolled child, but has only small negative effects on time spent doing activities together. Correspondingly, center-based care increases activities as a share of the time spent together with the child. The ...
2020| Jonas Jessen, C. Katharina Spieß, Sevrin Waights
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DIW Discussion Papers 1896 / 2020
Individuals typically traverse several life phases before forming a family. We analyse whether changing the duration of one of these phases, the education phase, affects the timing of marriage and childbearing. For this purpose, we exploit the introduction of short school years in Germany in 1966-67, which compressed the education phase without affecting the curriculum. Based on difference-in-differences ...
2020| Josefine Koebe, Jan Marcus
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DIW Discussion Papers 1895 / 2020
There is ample empirical literature centering on the effectiveness of foreign exchange intervention (FXI). Given the mix of objectives and country-heterogeneity, the general lack of consensus thus far is no surprise. We shed light on this debate by conducting the first comprehensive meta-analysis in the FXI literature, with 279 reported effects that stem from 74 distinct empirical studies. We cover ...
2020| Lucía Arango-Lozano, Lukas Menkhoff, Daniela Rodríguez-Novoa, Mauricio Villamizar-Villegas
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DIW Discussion Papers 1894 / 2020
The rise of dominant firms in data driven industries is often credited to their alleged data advantage. Empirical evidence lending support to this conjecture is surprisingly scarce. In this paper we document that data as an input into machine learning tasks display features that support the claim of data being a source of market power. We study how data on keywords improve the search result quality ...
2020| Maximilian Schäfer, Geza Sapi
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DIW Discussion Papers 1893 / 2020
Identifying essential and frontline workers and understanding their characteristics is useful for policymakers and researchers in targeting social insurance and safety net policies in response to the COVID-19 crisis. We develop a working definition that may inform additional research and policy discussion and provide data on the demographic and labor market composition of these workers. In a three-step ...
2020| Francine D. Blau, Josefine Koebe, Pamela A. Meyerhofer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1892 / 2020
This paper discusses the potential role of fossil natural gas (and other gases) in the process of the energy transformation in Europe on its way to complete decarbonization. Mainstream conventional wisdom has it that natural gas, perhaps in combination with other gases, should maintain an important role in the energy mix, first, as a “bridge fuel”, and then through a gradual transition toward decarbonized ...
2020| Christian von Hirschhausen, Claudia Kemfert, Fabian Praeger
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DIW Discussion Papers 1891 / 2020
Effective attention to information may play a prominent role in consumer choice for energy-intensive services and it may simply be a function of receiving timely information when consumption takes place. This paper investigates whether and why the timing of utility bills leads to salience bias in heat energy consumption. In Germany, the 12-month billing period varies across buildings with a significant ...
2020| Puja Singhal
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DIW Discussion Papers 1890 / 2020
Cities worldwide have regulated peer-to-peer short-term rental platforms claiming that those platforms remove apartments from the long-term housing market, causing an in- crease in rents. Establishing and quantifying such a causal link is, however, challenging. We investigate two policy changes in Berlin to first assess how effective they were in regulating Airbnb, the largest online peer-to-peer short-term ...
2020| Tomaso Duso, Claus Michelsen, Maximilian Schäfer, Kevin Ducbao Tran
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DIW Discussion Papers 1889 / 2020
The rise of online platforms has disrupted numerous traditional industries. A prime example is the short-term accommodation platform Airbnb and how it affects the hotel industry. On the one hand, consumers can profit from Airbnb due to an increased number of choices and lower prices. On the other hand, critics of the platform argue that it allows professional hosts to operate de facto hotels while ...
2020| Maximilian Schäfer, Kevin Ducbao Tran
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DIW Discussion Papers 1888 / 2020
In online commerce, obfuscation strategies by sellers are hypothesized to mislead consumers to their detriment and to the profit of sellers. One such obfuscation strategy is partitioned pricing in which the price is split into a base price and add-on fees. While empirical evidence suggests that partitioned pricing affects consumer decisions through salience effects, its consumer welfare consequences ...
2020| Kevin Ducbao Tran
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DIW Discussion Papers 1887 / 2020
We investigate the dimensions through which R&D spillovers are propagated across firms via cooperation through Research Joint Ventures (RJVs). We build on the framework developed by Bloom et al. (2013) which considers the opposing effects of technology spillovers and product market rivalry, and extend it to account for RJVs. Our main findings are that the adverse effects of product market rivalry are ...
2020| Albert Banal-Estañol, Tomaso Duso, Jo Seldeslachts, Florian Szücs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1886 / 2020
When analyzing potential ways to counter climate change, standard models of green growth abstract from investment in substitutability between “clean” and “dirty” energy inputs. Instead, they rely on the assumption that efficiency with respect to fossil fuels can be increased perpetually. However, this is not in line with observed firm investment behavior and the limits to efficiency imposed by thermodynamic ...
2020| Fabian Stöckl
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DIW Discussion Papers 1885 / 2020
We fit CES and VES production functions to data from a numerical bottom-up optimization model of electricity supply with clean and dirty inputs. This approach allows for studying high shares of clean energy not observable today and for isolating mechanisms that impact the elasticity of substitution between clean and dirty energy. Central results show that (i) dirty inputs are not essential for production. ...
2020| Fabian Stöckl, Alexander Zerrahn
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DIW Discussion Papers 1884 / 2020
We study repayment and delinquency in an innovative loan contract that offers borrowers a wide range of flexibility. Using a large administrative dataset, we perform unsupervised pattern analysis to study how borrowers repay within the framework of this loan. We identify eight clusters that can be grouped into three distinct repayment types. We show that borrowers with fluctuating incomes and limited ...
2020| Antonia Grohmann, Steffen Herbold, Friederike Lenel
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DIW Discussion Papers 1883 / 2020
Due to its technical complexity, the co-production of electricity generation and nuclear weapons, and its high fixed costs, nuclear power is a particularly complex commodity, which poses unusual challenges for state economic (or industrial, defense, innovation etc.) policy. As in other sectors, the question arises here, too, of an adequate division of private and public responsibilities, in other words ...
2020| Ben Wealer, Christian von Hirschhausen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1882 / 2020
Based on findings from high-income countries, typically economists hypothesize that having more children unambiguously decreases the time mothers spend in the labor mar- ket. Few studies on lower-income countries, in which low household wealth, informal child care, and informal employment opportunities prevail, find mixed results. Using Mexican census data, I find a positive effect of an instrument-induced ...
2020| Julia Schmieder
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DIW Discussion Papers 1881 / 2020
“Sin taxes” are high on the political agenda in the global fight against obesity. Ac- cording to theory, they are welfare improving if consumers with low self-control are at least as price responsive as consumers with high self-control, even in the absence of ex- ternalities. In this paper, we investigate if consumers with low and high self-control react differently to sin tax variation. For identification, ...
2020| Renke Schmacker, Sinne Smed
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DIW Discussion Papers 1880 / 2020
Coal consumption and production have sharply declined in recent years in the U.S., despite political support. Reasons are mostly unfavorable economic conditions for coal, including competition from natural gas and renewables in the power sector, as well as an aging coal- fired power plant fleet. The U.S. Energy Information Administration as well as most models of North American energy markets depict ...
2020| Christian Hauenstein, Franziska Holz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1879 / 2020
I posit that hourly changes in air pollution affect criminality through two distinct pathways, via physiological effects on the criminal and by changes in the tightness of the market for criminal activities. To disentangle individual from market effects, I develop a behavioral model of the individual decision to transgress and a model of search-and-matching frictions between criminals and crime opportunities. ...
2020| Luis Sarmiento
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DIW Discussion Papers 1878 / 2020
I assert that air pollution from nitrogen oxides affects the productivity of employees in Mexican court hearings. This is the first article analyzing this connection and the first to disentangle work-breaks from the productivity of white-collar workers. I merge hourly pollution with granular hearing data under the assumption that the length of the hearing approximates productivity and identify causality ...
2020| Luis Sarmiento