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DIW Discussion Papers 1599 / 2016
We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal inference, the magnitude of the effects is equivalent to moving from the bottom to the fourth income decile. But they do not last very long: the effects are gone within a year. These conclusions ...
2016| Paul Dolan, Georgios Kavetsos, Christian Krekel, Dimitris Mavridis, Robert Metcalfe, Claudia Senik, Stefan Szymanski, Nicolas R. Ziebarth
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DIW Discussion Papers 1598 / 2016
China’s government is promoting the shift towards a consumption-based economy since a few years. The explicit goal to significantly raise the percentage of wages in the national household income is integral part of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15). The changes in the economic strategy are likely to affect the attractiveness of the country to foreign investors. In this paper, we raise the hypothesis ...
2016| Julian Donaubauer, Christian Dreger
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DIW Discussion Papers 1597 / 2016
Die Debatte um Arbeitszeiten und deren Regulierung wird in der deutschen Öffentlichkeiterneut geführt. Empirische Grundlage sind dabei häufig Studien auf Basis des Mikrozensusoder des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP), die teilweise erhebliche Unterschiede in ihrenErgebnissen aufweisen (Rengers 2015, Holst/Wieber 2014). In dem vorliegenden Beitragwird den Ursachen für diese Unterschiede nachgegangen. ...
2016| Elke Holst, Julia Bringmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1596 / 2016
We study the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policy in the euro area using structural vector autoregressions, identified with an external instrument. The instrument is the common unexpected variation in euro area sovereign spreads for different maturities on policy announcement days. We first show that expansionary monetary surprises are effective at lowering public and private interest ...
2016| Michael Hachula, Michele Piffer, Malte Rieth
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DIW Discussion Papers 1595 / 2016
Initiiert von einer lebhaften öffentlichen und wissenschaftlichen Debatte um die Eignung des Bruttoinlandsprodukts als Indikator für materiellen Wohlstand sind zahlreiche alternative Maße zur Wohlstands- und Wohlfahrtsmessung entwickelt worden. Fällt dabei die Wahl auf einen Indikatorensatz, ist die Bestimmung der optimalen Anzahl der Indikatoren eine zentrale Herausforderung. Je mehr Indikatoren ausgewählt ...
2016| Beate Jochimsen, Christian Raffer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1594 / 2016
The financial crisis led to a deep recession in many industrial countries. While large emerging countries recovered relatively quickly from the financial crisis, their performance deteriorated in the last years, despite the modest recovery in advanced economies. The higher divergence of business cycles is closely linked to the Chinese transformation. During the crisis, the Chinese fiscal stimulus prevented ...
2016| Ansgar Belke, Christian Dreger, Irina Dubova
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DIW Discussion Papers 1593 / 2016
We use a lab-in-the-field experiment to investigate intra-couple labor supply decisions and the division of housework under individual and joint income taxation systems. In order to eliminate problems of endogenous intra-couple time use decisions, we exogenously varied not only the taxation system but also the intra-couple roles of primary and secondary earners. Using work effort as a proxy for labor ...
2016| Melanie Schröder, Norma Burow
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DIW Discussion Papers 1592 / 2016
Unser Beitrag nimmt die zu erwartenden Effekte des Elterngeld Plus und der Partnerschaftsbonusmonate in den Blick. Dem Reformziel entsprechend betrachten wir zum einen die Anreize für die Erwerbsbeteiligung von Müttern im ersten und zweiten Jahr nach der Geburt und zum anderen die möglichen Wirkungen auf die Beteiligung der Väter an der Elterngeldnutzung. Das Elterngeld wurde inzwischen acht Jahre ...
2016| Johannes Geyer, Alexandra Krause
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DIW Discussion Papers 1591 / 2016
This paper estimates a reduced-form model to assess the credit risk of General Insurance (GI) non-life firms in the UK. Compared to earlier studies, it uses a much larger sample including 30 years of data for 515 firms, and also considers a much wider set of possible determinants of credit risk. The empirical results suggest that macroeconomic and firm-specific factors both play important roles. Other ...
2016| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Mario Cerrato, Xuan Zhang
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DIW Discussion Papers 1590 / 2016
This paper investigates whether the RMB is in the process of replacing the US dollar as the anchor currency in nine ASEAN countries, and also the linkages between the ASEAN currencies and a regional currency unit. A long-memory (fractional integration) model allowing for endogenously determined structural breaks is estimated for these purposes (Gil-Alana, 2008). The results suggest that the ASEAN currencies ...
2016| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana, Kefei You
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DIW Discussion Papers 1589 / 2016
Despite increasing access to university education, students from disadvantaged or non-academic family backgrounds are still underrepresented at universities. In this regard, the economic literature mainly studies the effect of financial constraints on post-secondary educational decisions. Our knowledge on potential effects of other constraints regarding university education is more limited. We investigate ...
2016| Frauke H. Peter, Vaishali Zambre
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DIW Discussion Papers 1588 / 2016
This paper examines the Taylor rule in five emerging economies, namely Indonesia, Israel, South Korea, Thailand, and Turkey. In particular, it investigates whether monetary policy in these countries can be more accurately described by (i) an augmented rule including the exchange rate, as well as (ii) a nonlinear threshold specification (estimated using GMM), instead of a baseline linear rule. The results ...
2016| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Abdurrahman Nazif Catik, Mohamad Husam Helmi, Faek Menla Ali, Coskun Akdeniz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1587 / 2016
Despite of its relevance for science policy and the scientific community, empirical research on doctoral education in Germany is sparse. The few papers available face challenges in the sampling approach: simple random sampling is not possible, because a universal register of PhD candidates in Germany does not exist yet. This article focuses on the issues related to possible data collections for the ...
2016| Anna Fräßdorf, Mathis Fräßdorf
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DIW Discussion Papers 1586 / 2016
This paper investigates the effect of locus of control (LOC) on the length of mothers’ employment break after childbirth. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), duration data reveals that women with an internal LOC return to employment more quickly than women with an external LOC. We find evidence that this effect is mainly related to differential appreciation of the career costs ...
2016| Eva M. Berger, Luke Haywood
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DIW Discussion Papers 1585 / 2016
Benchmarking methods are widely used in the regulation of firms in network industries working under heterogeneous exogenous environments. In this paper we compare three recently developed estimators, namely conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007b), latent class SFA (Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004; Greene, 2005), and the StoNEZD approach (Johnson and Kuosmanen, 2011) by means of Monte Carlo simulation ...
2016| Maria Nieswand, Stefan Seifert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1584 / 2016
Rising rents in German cities have led to an intense debate about the need for tighter rent controls in housing markets. In April 2015, the so-called rental brake was introduced, which imposes upper bounds for rents in new contracts, in order to immediately slow down the increase of rents in tight housing markets. Since then, 11 federal states made use of this instrument. We take advantage of this ...
2016| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Andreas Mense, Claus Michelsen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1583 / 2016
The 2008—2009 global financial crisis has raised new questions about the relationship between equity fund flows and stock market returns. This paper analyses it using US monthly data over the period 2000:1-2015:08. A VAR-GARCH(1,1)-in-mean model with a BEKK representation is estimated, and a switch dummy for the global financial crisis is also included. We find causality-in-mean from stock market returns ...
2016| Vassilios Babalos, Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Nicola Spagnolo
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DIW Discussion Papers 1582 / 2016
We use a repeated incentivized risk experiment in rural Thailand to test determinants of changes in the level of individual risk aversion over time. We find that risk aversion significantly changes between 2008 and 2013 as a result of macro- andmicro-level shocks. Strong macroeconomic recovery following the 2007/08 financial crisis makes people more risk-seeking, whereas macroeconomic normalization ...
2016| Lukas Menkhoff, Sahra Sakha
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DIW Discussion Papers 1581 / 2016
This paper investigates whether there is an S-Curve in Colombia using bilateral and disaggregated quarterly data for the period 1991-2014. More precisely, the short-run effects of a depreciation on the TB are analysed in 27 industries covered by the PAG Free Trade Agreement. The S-Curve found in sectors representing 30% of total industrial production suggests that in these cases competitive devaluations ...
2016| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Rodrigo Costamagna, Gustavo Rossini
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DIW Discussion Papers 1580 / 2016
This paper examines the impact of the global financial crisis on the banking sector in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, as well as the main determinants of the profitability of both domestic and foreign banks. The empirical findings suggest that during the crisis the former outperformed the latter in that region. As for the determinants of profitability, size does not appear to play ...
2016| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Suman Lodh, Monomita Nandy