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DIW Discussion Papers 1639 / 2017
In aging societies, information on how to reform pension systems is essential to policy makers. This study scrutinizes effects of early retirement disincentives on retirement behavior, individual welfare, pensions and public budget. We employ administrative pension data and a detailed model of the German tax and social security system to estimate a structural dynamic retirement model. We find that ...
2017| Timm Bönke, Daniel Kemptner, Holger Lüthen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1638 / 2017
We report on two experiments investigating whether there is a gender difference in thewillingness to compete against oneself (self-competition), similar to what is found whencompeting against others (other-competition). In one laboratory and one online marketexperiment, involving a total of 1,200 participants, we replicate the gender-gap inwillingness to other-compete but find no evidence of a gender ...
2017| Coren L. Apicella, Elif E. Demiral, Johanna Mollerstrom
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DIW Discussion Papers 1637 / 2017
We examine the role of prosumage of solar electricity, i.e. PV self-generation combined with distributed storage, in the context of the low-carbon energy transformation. First, we devise a qualitative account of arguments in favor of and against prosumage. Second, we give an overview of prosumage in Germany. Prosumage will likely gain momentum as support payments expire for an increasing share of PV ...
2017| Wolf-Peter Schill, Alexander Zerrahn, Friedrich Kunz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1636 / 2017
This paper investigates the link between mortgage supply shocks at the banklevel and regional house price growth in the U.S. using micro-level data on mortgage markets from the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act for the 1990-2014 period. Our results suggest that bank-specific mortgage supply shocks indeed affect house price growth at the regional level. The larger the idiosyncratic shocks to newly issued ...
2017| Franziska Bremus, Thomas Krause, Felix Noth
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DIW Discussion Papers 1635 / 2017
We analyze a vertical structure with an upstream monopoly and two downstream retailers. Demand is uncertain but each retailer receives an informative private signal about the state of the demand. We construct an incentive compatible and ex ante balanced mechanism which induces the retailers to share their information truthfully. Information sharing can be profitable for the retailers but is likely ...
2017| Pio Baake, Andreas Harasser
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DIW Discussion Papers 1634 / 2017
This paper experimentally investigates how concerns for social approval relate to intrinsic motivations to purchase ethically. Participants state their willingness-to-pay for both a fair trade and a conventional chocolate bar in private or publicly. A standard model of social image predicts that all increase their fair trade premium when facing an audience. We find that the premium is higher in public ...
2017| Jana Friedrichsen, Dirk Engelmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1633 / 2017
Using panel data of 17 OECD countries for 1980-2011, we find that the distributional consequences of fiscal consolidations depend significantly on the level of private indebtedness. Austerity leads to a strong and persistent increase in income inequality during periods of private debt overhang. In contrast, there are no discernible distributional effects when private debt is low. This result is robust ...
2017| Mathias Klein, Roland Winkler
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DIW Discussion Papers 1632 / 2016
Identification through heteroskedasticity in heteroskedastic simultaneous equations models (HSEMs) is considered. The possibility that heteroskedasticity identifies the structural parameters only partially is explicitly allowed for. The asymptoticproperties of the identified parameters are derived. Moreover, tests for identification through heteroskedasticity are developed and their asymptotic distributions ...
2016| Helmut Lütkepohl, George Milunivich, Minxian Yang
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DIW Discussion Papers 1631 / 2016
Empirical studies support the hysteresis hypothesis that recessions have a permanent effect on the level of output. We analyze the implications of hysteresis for fiscal policy in a DSGE model. We assume a simple learning-by-doing mechanism where demand-driven changes in employment can affect the level of productivity permanently, leading to hysteresis in output. We show that the fiscal output multiplier ...
2016| Philipp Engler, Juha Tervala
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DIW Discussion Papers 1630 / 2016
Despite political efforts, balancing work and family life is still challenging. This paper provides novel evidence on the effect of firm level interventions that seek to reduce the work-life conflict. The focus is on how a specific workplace policy, namely childcare support, affects the well-being, working time, and caring behavior of mothers with young children. We exploit the fact that since the ...
2016| Verena Lauber, Johanna Storck
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DIW Discussion Papers 1629 / 2016
We analyze pricing and competition under paid prioritization within a model of interconnected internet service providers (ISPs), heterogeneous content providers (CPs) and heterogeneous consumers. We show that prioritization is welfare superior to a regime without prioritization (network neutrality) and yields higher incentives for investment in network capacities. As ISPs price discriminate between ...
2016| Pio Baake, Slobodan Sudaric
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DIW Discussion Papers 1628 / 2016
We analyze the implication of time-inconsistent preferences in educational decision making and corresponding policies using a structural dynamic choice model. Based on a novel identification approach, we exploit variation in average years invested in degree attainment through various educational reforms to identify the discount factor of hyperbolic time preferences. We make two important research contributions. ...
2016| Daniel Kemptner, Songül Tolan
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DIW Discussion Papers 1627 / 2016
This paper provides evidence over a long time period on the question of who bears the burden of social security contributions (SSC) in Germany. Following Alvaredo et al. (2016) we exploit kinks in the budget set generated by a drop in the marginal SSC rate at earnings caps. Based on cross-sectional earnings distributions the framework does not rely on policy reforms. Applying the approach to administrative ...
2016| Kai-Uwe Müller, Michael Neumann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1626 / 2016
We analyze the positive and normative effects of a progressive tax on wages in a nonlinear New Keynesian DSGE model in the presence of demand and technology shocks. The non-linearity allows us to disentangle the effects of the progressive tax on the volatility and the level of macroeconomic variables, for both intertemporally optimizing (“Ricardian") and non-Ricardian (“rule-of-thumb") households. ...
2016| Philipp Engler, Wolfgang Strehl
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DIW Discussion Papers 1625 / 2016
Several studies have analyzed the trade and output effects of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the United States and the European Union, but our paper is the first attempt to study its welfare effects. We measure the welfare effect of TTIP as the percentage of initial consumption that households would be willing to pay for TTIP in order to remain as well off with TTIP ...
2016| Philipp Engler, Juha Tervala
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DIW Discussion Papers 1624 / 2016
Short-term operating requirements and constraints in power systems are becoming increasingly important with the greater flexibility needed due to the integration of variable renewables. However, large problem sizes and computational barriers have limited the extent to which they are included in long-term planning models. Our objective is to understand the role of electricity storage in future renewable-based ...
2016| Tom Brijs, Arne van Stiphout, Sauleh Siddiqui, Ronnie Belmans
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DIW Discussion Papers 1623 / 2016
I build a model where creditworthy countries may use fiscal austerity to communicate their ability to repay sovereign debt and show that the signaling channel is active only for high levels of asymmetric information. The model generates a negative association between the amount of public information, provided by the rating agencies, and fiscal tightness. Informed by the model predictions, I build a ...
2016| Anna Gibert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1622 / 2016
Most literature on the relationship between childcare availability and maternal labour force participation examines childcare for preschool aged children. Yet families must continue to arrange childcare once their children enter primary school, particularly in countries where the school day ends at lunchtime. In this paper we examine the case of Germany, a country that has moved from an exclusively ...
2016| Ludovica Gambaro, Jan Marcus, Frauke H. Peter
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DIW Discussion Papers 1621 / 2016
Common intuition holds that retail real-time pricing (RTP) of electricity demand should become more beneficial in markets with high variable renewable energy (VRE) supply mainly due to increased price volatility. Using German market data, we test this intuition by simulating long-run electricity market equilibria with carbon-tax-induced VRE investment and real-time price responsive and nonresponsive ...
2016| Christian Gambardella, Michael Pahle, Wolf-Peter Schill
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DIW Discussion Papers 1620 / 2016
Nearly every carbon price regulates the production of carbon emissions, typically at midstream points of compliance, such as a power plant. Over the last six years, however, policymakers in Australia, California, China, Japan, and Korea implemented carbon prices that regulate the consumption of carbon emissions, where points of compliance are farther downstream, such as distributors or final consumers. ...
2016| Clayton Munnings, William Acworth, Oliver Sartor, Yong-Gun Kim, Karsten Neuhoff