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DIW Discussion Papers 1519 / 2015
This paper investigates the effects of equity and bond portfolio inflows on exchange rate volatility, using monthly bilateral data for the US vis-a-vis eight Asian developing and emerging countries (India, Indonesia, South Korea, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines, and Taiwan) over the period 1993:01-2012:11, and estimating a time-varying transition probability Markov-switching model. We ...
2015| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Faek Menla Ali, Fabio Spagnolo, Nicola Spagnolo
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DIW Discussion Papers 1518 / 2015
This study examines foreign exchange intervention based on novel daily data covering 33 countries from 1995 to 2011. We find that intervention is widely used and an effective policy tool, with a success rate in excess of 80 percent under some criteria. The policy works well in terms of smoothing the path of exchange rates, and in stabilizing the exchange rate in countries with narrow band regimes. ...
2015| Marcel Fratzscher, Oliver Goede, Lukas Menkhoff, Lucio Sarno, Tobias Stöhr
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DIW Discussion Papers 1517 / 2015
This paper aims to verify results of the innovative study on gender identity for the USA by Bertrand et al. (2015) for Germany. They found that women who would earn more than their husbands distort their labor market outcome in order not to violate traditional gender identity norms. Using data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) we also find that the distribution of the share of income ...
2015| Anna Wieber, Elke Holst
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DIW Discussion Papers 1516 / 2015
The Netherlands have been a pivotal supplier in Western European natural gas markets in the last decades. Recent analyses show that the Netherlands would play an important role in replacing Russian supplies in Germany and France in case of Russian export disruption (Richter & Holz, 2015). However, the Netherlands have suffered from regular earthquakes in recent years that are related to the natural ...
2015| Franziska Holz, Hanna Brauers, Philipp M. Richter, Thorsten Roobeek
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DIW Discussion Papers 1515 / 2015
This paper investigates the impact of indemnity payments from index insurance on the asset recovery of households after a catastrophic weather disaster occurs. Our focus is on the Index-Based Livestock Insurance (IBLI) in Mongolia. We analyze the effect of IBLI indemnity payments after a once-in-50-year winter disaster struck Mongolia over 2009/10. The database for our analysis is three waves of a ...
2015| Veronika Bertram-Huemmer, Kati Kraehnert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1514 / 2015
This paper uncovers ongoing trends in idiosyncratic earnings volatility across generations by decomposing residual earnings auto-covariances into a permanent and a transitory component. We employ data on complete earnings life cycles forprime age men born 1935 through 1974 that covers earnings between 1960 and 2009. Over this period, the German labor market undergoes a heavy transformation and experiences ...
2015| Timm Bönke, Matthias Giesecke, Holger Lüthen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1513 / 2015
International offset certificates trade at lower prices than European Union Allowances (EUAs), although they are substitutes within the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) for CO2. Firms therefore had a strong incentive to use the cheaper certificates. However, a considerable number of firms did not use their allowed offset quota and, by doing so, seemingly forwent profits. While most of the literature ...
2015| Helene Naegele
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DIW Discussion Papers 1512 / 2015
We analyze the effects of an incentive based regulatory scheme with revenue caps on the investment behaviors and decisions of 109 electricity distribution companies operating in Germany in 2006-2012. We hypothesize that Germany's implementation of incentive regulation in 2009 has a negative impact on total investment, and that firms increase their investments in the base year. We build a model that ...
2015| Astrid Cullmann, Maria Nieswand
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DIW Discussion Papers 1511 / 2015
Im vorliegenden kleinen Aufsatz werden der Geschichte der deutschen Wiedervereinigung 1990 drei „Fußnoten“ angefügt. Zu den Themen „Abschätzung der Produktivität der DDR-Wirtschaft“, „Dauer des Aufholprozesses der Neuen Bundesländer“ und „Rentenangleichung“. Anschließend werden einige Schlussfolgerungen für die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen wissenschaftlicher Politikberatung gezogen.
2015| Gert G. Wagner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1510 / 2015
What began as a financial crisis in the United States in 2007–2008 quickly evolved into a massive crisis of the global real economy. We investigate the importance of the bank lending and firm borrowing channel in the international transmission of bank distress to the real economy—in particular, to real investment and labor employment by nonfinancial firms. We analyze whether and to what extent firms ...
2015| Nadja Dwenger, Frank M. Fossen, Martin Simmler
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DIW Discussion Papers 1509 / 2015
This paper proposes a test for the existence and degree of contagious presenteeism and negative externalities in sickness insurance schemes. First, we theoretically decompose moral hazard into shirking and contagious presenteeism behavior and derive testable conditions. Then, we implement the test exploiting German sick pay reforms and administrative industry-level data on certified sick leave by diagnoses. ...
2015| Stefan Pichler, Nicolas R. Ziebarth
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DIW Discussion Papers 1508 / 2015
This paper adopts a VAR-GARCH approach to model the dynamic linkages between both the mean and the variance of macro news and commodity returns (Gold, Corn, Wheat, Soybeans, Silver, Platinum, Palladium, Copper, Aluminium and Crude Oil) over the period 01/01/2001-26/09/2014. The chosen specification also controls for the effect of the exchange rate. The results can be summarised as follows. Mean spillovers ...
2015| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Fabio Spagnolo, Nicola Spagnolo
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DIW Discussion Papers 1507 / 2015
We analyze the interactions between different renewable support schemes and the benefits of real-time pricing (RTP) using a stylized economic model with a detailed demand-side representation calibrated to the German market. We find that there are considerable differences between a market premium on energy and capacity regarding wholesale prices, support levies and market values, which are all related ...
2015| Michael Pahle, Wolf-Peter Schill, Christian Gambardella, Oliver Tietjen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1506 / 2015
This article assesses predictors of payouts and non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases decided by the Spanish Supreme Court from 2006 until 2010. Medical malpractice cases can be judged in administrative or civil courts, and this distinction heavily relies on the type of hospital where the medical accident took place (in general terms, administrative courts judge cases involving public hospitals ...
2015| Sofia Amaral-Garcia
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DIW Discussion Papers 1505 / 2015
This paper analyses the long-memory properties of US and European stock indices, as well as their linkages, using fractional integration and fractional cointegration techniques. These methods are more general and have higher power than the standard ones usually employed in the literature. The empirical evidence based on them suggests the presence of unit roots in both the S&P 500 Index and the Euro ...
2015| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana, C. James Orlando
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DIW Discussion Papers 1504 / 2015
Financial literacy predicts informed financial decisions, but what explains financial literacy? We use the concept of financial socialization and aim to represent three major agents of financial socialization: family, school and work. Thus we compile twelve relevant childhood characteristics in a new survey study and examine their relation to financial literacy, while controlling for established socio-demographic ...
2015| Antonia Grohmann, Roy Kouwenberg, Lukas Menkhoff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1503 / 2015
In many countries, important features of municipal government (such as the electoral system, mayors' salaries, and the number of councillors) depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds. Several papers have used a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to measure the effects of these threshold-based policies on political and economic outcomes. Using evidence ...
2015| Andrew C. Eggers, Ronny Freier, Veronica Grembi, Tommaso Nannicini
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DIW Discussion Papers 1502 / 2015
We analyze the top tail of the wealth distribution in Germany, France, Spain, and Greece based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be underrepresented in household surveys we integrate the big fortunes from rich lists, estimate a Pareto distribution, and impute the missing rich. Instead of the Forbes list we mainly rely on national rich lists since ...
2015| Stefan Bach, Andreas Thiemann, Aline Zucco
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DIW Discussion Papers 1501 / 2015
This paper examines whether the Big Three credit rating agencies actually played as active a role in the Euro Crisis as previously asserted. On the basis of panel data methods for a set of 11 EMU countries, the analysis reveals significant evidence for an arbitrary markup on the GIPS group of countries across agencies. This markup, which ranges from 1.5 notches for Moody’s to 2.2 notches for S&P, suggests ...
2015| Steffen Nauhaus
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DIW Discussion Papers 1500 / 2015
Germany introduced a new mandatory insurance for long-term care in 1995 as part of its social security system. It replaced a system based on means tested social welfare. Benefits from the long-term care insurance are not means tested and depend on the required level of care. The insurance provides both benefits in kind and cash benefits. The new scheme improved the situation for households to organize ...
2015| Johannes Geyer, Thorben Korfhage