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DIW Discussion Papers 1779 / 2019
With Germany’s nuclear phase-out, 23 reactors need to be dismantled in the near future. Initiated by the dire financial situation of the affected utilities in 2014, a major discourse on ensuring financial liability led to a redistribution of liabilities and finances, with the utilities remaining in charge of dismantling, while liability for interim and final storage now transferred to the public. This ...
2019| Tim Scherwath, Ben Wealer, Roman Mendelevitch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1778 / 2019
In the shadow of homeownership and public housing, social policy through the regulation of private rental markets is a neglected and underestimated field of social policy. This paper, therefore, presents unique new data on the development of private tenancy legislation through the binary coding of rent control, the protection of tenants from eviction, and rental housing rationing laws across more than ...
2019| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Sebastian Kohl, Yulia Prozorova, Julien Licheron
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DIW Discussion Papers 1777 / 2018
Motivated by the EU concept of Pre-Commercial Procurement and the massivepresence of SMEs in the European economy, we study how budget constraints affect R&D effort in sequential elimination tournaments. We show that introducingbudget constraints leads to a non-monotonicity in unconstrained contestants' effort.Furthermore, we show that if the budget asymmetry is not too large, unconstrainedcontestants ...
2018| Malin Arve, Olga Chiappinelli
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DIW Discussion Papers 1776 / 2018
Understanding the distributional impacts of market-based climate policies is crucial to design economically efficient climate change mitigation policies that are socially acceptable and avoid adverse impacts on the poor. Empirical studies that examine the distributional impacts of carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidy reforms in different countries arrive at ambiguous results. To systematically determine ...
2018| Nils Ohlendorf, Michael Jakob, Jan Christoph Minx, Carsten Schröder, Jan Christoph Steckel
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DIW Discussion Papers 1775 / 2018
This study estimates mean and distributional effects of early between-school ability tracking on student achievement. For identification, I exploit heterogeneity in tracking regimes between German federal states. After comprehensive primary school, about 40% of students are selected for the academic track and taught in separate schools in all states. The remaining students, however, are either taught ...
2018| Sönke Hendrik Matthewes
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DIW Discussion Papers 1774 / 2018
A rich literature links knowledge inputs with innovative outputs. However, most of what is known is restricted to manufacturing. This paper analyzes whether the three aspects involving innovative activity - R&D; innovative output; and productivity - hold for knowledge intensive services. Combining the models of Crepon et al. (1998) and of Ackerberg et al. (2015), allows for causal interpretation of ...
2018| David B. Audretsch, Marian Hafenstein, Alexander S. Kritikos, Alexander Schiersch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1773 / 2018
This paper explores the extent to which emissions limits on stack concentrations under the Large Combustion Plant (LCP) Directive succeeded in mitigating local air pollutants from thermal power stations in the European Union. We take advantage of the discontinuities in regulation status to show that the emission performance standards led to sizeable declines in concentrations of SO2 , NOx, and particulate ...
2018| Puja Singhal
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DIW Discussion Papers 1772 / 2018
Understanding whether laws shape or simply reflect citizens’ attitudes is important but empirically difficult. We provide new evidence on this question by studying the relationship between legal same-sex relationship recognition policies (SSRRPs) and attitudes towards sexual minorities in Europe. Using data from the European Social Surveys covering 2002-2016 and exploiting variation in the timing of ...
2018| Cevat G. Aksoy, Christopher S. Carpenter, Ralph de Haas, Kevin Tran
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DIW Discussion Papers 1771 / 2018
This paper shows that politicians’ pressure to climb the career ladder increases bank risk exposure in their region. Chinese local politicians are set growth targets in their region that are relative to each other. Growth is stimulated by debt-financed programs which are mainly financed via bank loans. The stronger the performance pressure the riskier the respective local bank exposure becomes. This ...
2018| Li Wang, Lukas Menkhoff, Michael Schröder, Xian Xu
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DIW Discussion Papers 1770 / 2018
Although the proportion of students enrolled in college increased in the last decades, students from non-college family backgrounds remain underrepresented in higher education around the world. This study sheds light on whether the provision of information in a randomized controlled trial with more than 1,000 German high school students results in higher college enrollment rates. One year prior to ...
2018| Frauke H. Peter, C. Katharina Spieß, Vaishali Zambre
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DIW Discussion Papers 1769 / 2018
Using electricity for heating can contribute to decarbonization and provide flexibility to integrate variable renewable energy. We analyze the case of electric storage heaters in German 2030 scenarios with an open-source electricity sector model. Making customary night-time storage heaters temporally more flexible offers only moderate benefits because renewable availability during daytime is limited ...
2018| Wolf-Peter Schill, Alexander Zerrahn
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DIW Discussion Papers 1768 / 2018
This paper analyzes links between institutional harmonization and bilateral portfolio debt and equity holdings at the sectoral level. Motivated by the action plan for the European Capital Markets Union, we examine the potential for legal harmonization and convergence in institutional quality to affect financial structures. Our analysis yields three key insights. First, legal harmonization across the ...
2018| Franziska Bremus, Tatsiana Kliatskova
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DIW Discussion Papers 1767 / 2018
Die „Erzbergerschen Steuer- und Finanzreformen“ 1919/20 haben das deutsche Steuer- und Finanzsystem nahezu vollständig umgestaltet, modernisiert und stark ausgebaut. Wesentliche Elemente dieser Reformen haben bis heute Bestand– die Grundstrukturen des Steuersystems und der Steuerrechtsordnung sowie der zentralistische kooperative Finanzföderalismus. Das NS-Regime konsolidierte die Reformen und erhöhte ...
2018| Stefan Bach
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DIW Discussion Papers 1766 / 2018
Distributed photo-voltaic (PV) generation is one of the pillars of energy transitions around the world, but its deployment in the distribution grid requires costly reinforcements and expansions. Prosumage - consisting of a household-level PV unit coupled with a battery storage system - has been proposed as an effective means to facilitate the integration of renewable energy sources and reduce distribution ...
2018| Paul Neetzow, Roman Mendelevitch, Sauleh Siddiqui
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DIW Discussion Papers 1765 / 2018
Short-term electricity markets are key to an efficient production by generation units. We develop a two-period model to assess different bidding formats to determine for each bidding format the optimal bidding strategy of competitive generators facing price-uncertainty. We compare the results for simple bidding, block bidding and multi-part bidding and find that even under optimal simple and block ...
2018| Jörn C. Richstein, Casimir Lorenz, Karsten Neuhoff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1764 / 2018
Tests for identification through heteroskedasticity in structural vector autoregressive analysis are developed for models with two volatility states where the time point of volatility change is known. The tests are Wald type tests for which only the unrestricted model including the covariance matrices of the two volatility states have to be estimated. The residuals of the model are assumed to be from ...
2018| Helmut Lütkepohl, Mika Meitz, Aleksei NetŠunajev, Pentti Saikkonen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1763 / 2018
The human personality predicts a wide range of activities and occupational choices—from musical sophistication to entrepreneurial careers. However, which method should be applied if information on personality traits is used for prediction and advice? In psychological research, group profiles are widely employed. In this contribution, we examine the performance of profiles using the example of career ...
2018| Alexander Konon, Alexander Kritikos
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DIW Discussion Papers 1762 / 2018
Methods for constructing joint confidence bands for impulse response functions which are commonly used in vector autoregressive analysis are reviewed. While considering separate intervals for each horizon individually still seems to be the most common approach, a substantial number of methods have been proposed for making joint inferences about the complete impulse response paths up to a given horizon. ...
2018| Helmut Lütkepohl, Anna Staszewska-Bystrova, Peter Winker
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DIW Discussion Papers 1761 / 2018
This paper considers a fundamental question about the school environment – what are the long run effects of a student’s ordinal rank in elementary school? Using administrative data from all public school students in Texas, we show that students with a higher third grade academic rank, conditional on ability and classroom effects, have higher subsequent test scores, are more likely to take AP classes, ...
2018| Jeffrey T. Denning, Richard Murphy, Felix Weinhardt
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DIW Discussion Papers 1760 / 2018
This paper studies the extent to which working couples can insure one another against cyclical fluctuations in the labor market and examines the implications of joint household decision-making for cyclical fluctuations in the unemployment rate. For this purpose, I provide a dynamic life-cycle model of households that make joint savings and job search decisions in the presence of aggregate shocks. I ...
2018| Haomin Wang