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DIW Discussion Papers 1659 / 2017
Kazakhstan envisions a transition towards a green economy in the next decades which poses an immense challenge as the country heavily depends on (hydro-)carbon resources, for both its economy and its energy system. In this context, there is a lack of comprehensive and transparent planning tools to assess possible sustainable development pathways in regard to their technical, economic, and environmental ...
2017| Makpal Assembayeva, Jonas Egerer, Roman Mendelevitch, Nurkhat Zhakiyev
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DIW Discussion Papers 1658 / 2017
Changing employment conditions lead to new chances, but also new risks for employees. In the literature, increasing permeability between occupational and private life is discussed as one special outcome of this development that employees must face, especially those in highly qualified positions. Drawing on existing research, we investigate in how far women and men in those positions differ in their ...
2017| Anne Busch-Heizmann, Elke Holst
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DIW Discussion Papers 1657 / 2017
Social norms and attitudes towards gender roles have been shown to have a large effect on economic outcomes of men and women. Many countries have introduced policies that aim at changing gender stereotypes, for example fathers’ quota in parental leave schemes. In this paper, we analyze whether the introduction of the fathers’ quota in Germany in 2007, that caused a sharp increase in the take-up of ...
2017| Ulrike Unterhofer, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1656 / 2017
Abstract This paper expands the discussion about future balancing reserve provision to the long-term perspective of 2050. Most pathways for a transformation towards a decarbonized electricity sector rely on very high shares of fluctuating renewables. This can be a challenge for the provision of balancing reserves, although their influence on the balancing cost is unclear. Apart from the transformation ...
2017| Casimir Lorenz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1655 / 2017
This paper analyzes the influence of wind turbines as new participants on prices and allocation within balancing markets. We introduce the cost-minimizing electricity sector model ELMOD-MIP, that includes detailed unit-commitment constraints, complex combined heat and power constraints, and minimum bid sizes for balancing capacity reservation. The model also features a novel approach of modeling balancing ...
2017| Casimir Lorenz, Clemens Gerbaulet
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DIW Discussion Papers 1654 / 2017
We examine whether monetary transmission during the financial and sovereign debt crisis was dominated by the cost channel or by the demand-side channel effect. We use two approaches to track down the potential passthrough of changes in the monetary policy rate to those in consumer prices. First, we utilize panel data from the German manufacturing industry. Second, we conduct time series analyses for ...
2017| Dorothea Schäfer, Andreas Stephan, Khanh Trung Hoang
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DIW Discussion Papers 1653 / 2017
We present quasi-experimental evidence on the employment effects of an unprecedented large increase in the early retirement age (ERA). Raising the ERA has the potential to extend contribution periods and to reduce the number of pension beneficiaries at the same time, if employment exits are successfully delayed. However, workers may not be able to work longer or may choose other social support programs ...
2017| Johannes Geyer, Clara Welteke
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DIW Discussion Papers 1652 / 2017
Labor supply in the market for low-paid jobs in Germany is strongly influenced by tax exemptions - even for individuals to whom these exemptions do not apply. We present compelling evidence that an individual's choice set depends on other workers' preferences because firms cater their job offers to aggregate preferences in the market. We estimate an equilibrium job search model which rationalizes the ...
2017| Luke Haywood, Michael Neumann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1651 / 2017
This paper examines the effects of a substantial change in publicly funded paid parental leave in Germany on child development and socio-economic development gaps. For children born before January 1, 2007, parental leave benefits were means-tested and paid for up to 24 months after childbirth. For children born thereafter, parental leave benefits were earnings-related and only paid for up to 14 months. ...
2017| Mathias Huebener, Daniel Kuehnle, C. Katharina Spiess
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DIW Discussion Papers 1650 / 2017
This paper investigates how the withdrawal of banks from their cross-border business impacted the borrowing costs of European firms since the crisis. We combine aggregate information on total and cross-border credit with firm-level survey data for the period 2010 - 2014. We find that the decline in cross-border lending led to a deterioration in the borrowing conditions of small firms. In countries ...
2017| Franziska Bremus, Katja Neugebauer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1649 / 2017
Despite rather skeptical attitude of the economists toward the state intervention in the housing markets, the policy makers and general public typically are supporting it. As a result, in many European countries, since World War I the rent and eviction controls as well as social housing policies remain an important element of the government economic policies. Nevertheless, the macroeconomic effects ...
2017| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Julien Licheron
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DIW Discussion Papers 1648 / 2017
This paper analyses the stochastic properties of and the bilateral linkages between the central bank policy rates of the US, the Eurozone, Australia, Canada, Japan and the UK using fractional integration and cointegration techniques respectively. The univariate analysis suggests a high degree of persistence in all cases: the fractional integration parameter d is estimated to be above 1, ranging from ...
2017| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Hector Carcel, Luis A. Gil-Alana
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DIW Discussion Papers 1647 / 2017
This paper investigates persistence in financial time series at three different frequencies (daily, weekly and monthly). The analysis is carried out for various financial markets (stock markets, FOREX, commodity markets) over the period from 2000 to 2016 using two different long memory approaches (R/S analysis and fractional integration) for robustness purposes. The results indicate that persistence ...
2017| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana, Alex Plastun
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DIW Discussion Papers 1646 / 2017
This paper studies the effects of financial speculation on commodity futures returns, using publicly available data from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission, aggregated by trader groups. We exploit the heteroskedasticity in the weekly data to identify exogenous variation in speculators’ positions. The results suggest that idiosyncratic net long demand shocks of both index investors and hedge ...
2017| Michael Hachula, Malte Rieth
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DIW Discussion Papers 1645 / 2017
This paper complements evidence on the Allais paradox from advanced countries and educated people by a novel investigation in a poor rural area. The share of Allais-type behavior is indeed high and related to characteristics of “lacking ability”, such as poor education, unemployment, and little financial sophistication. Based on prospective reference theory, we extend these characteristics by biased ...
2017| Tabea Herrmann, Olaf Hübler, Lukas Menkhoff, Ulrich Schmidt
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DIW Discussion Papers 1644 / 2017
This paper uses a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the effect of wealth on individual social responsibility (ISR), defined as choosing a more socially responsible product if a cheaper alternative is available. We find that rich consumers are significantly less likely to engage in ISR than poor consumers. This suggests that socially responsible production conditions may not be normal ...
2017| Jana Friedrichsen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1643 / 2017
In this article, we study judicial behavior at the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC). British judges in general, and British high court judges in particular, are perceived to be independent and isolated from political pressure and interference. Furthermore, these judges tend to show a particularly high rate of consensus. This has led many scholars to consider that, contrarily to what holds ...
2017| Sofia Amaral-Garcia, Nuno Garoupa
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DIW Discussion Papers 1642 / 2017
There is evidence that estimates of long-run impulse responses of structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models based on long-run identifying restrictions may not be very accurate. This finding suggests that using short-run identifying restrictions may be preferable. We compare structural VAR impulse response estimates based on long-run and short-run identifying restrictions and find that long-run ...
2017| Helmut Lütkepohl, Anna Staszewska-Bystrova, Peter Winker
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DIW Discussion Papers 1641 / 2017
While the link between the ownership and productive efficiency of firms has been discussed extensively, no consensus exists regarding the superiority of one or the other in non-competitive, regulated environments. This paper applies a flexibleproduction model to test for efficiency differences associated with ownership types while allowing the production to adapt to market restructuring over time. ...
2017| Astrid Cullmann, Maria Nieswand, Julia Rechlitz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1640 / 2017
Replication studies are considered a hallmark of good scientific practice. Yet they are treated among researchers as an ideal to be professed but not practiced. To provide incentives and favorable boundary conditions for replication practice, the main stakeholders need to be aware of what drives replication. Here we investigate how often replication studies are published in empirical economics and ...
2017| Frank Mueller-Langer, Benedikt Fecher, Dietmar Harhoff, Gert G. Wagner