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DIW Discussion Papers 1319 / 2013
Using a sample of Europeans aged 50+ from twelve countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) we analyse the role of poor material conditions as a determinant of changes in health over a four-year period. We find that poverty defined with respect to relative incomes has no effect on changes in health. However, broader measures of poor material conditions such as subjective ...
2013| Maja Adena, Michal Myck
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DIW Discussion Papers 1318 / 2013
Technological changes in renewable energy technologies play an important role in the context of climate change as they contribute to a reduction of technology costs and lead to an increasing market penetration of emission reducing technologies. This paper provides a comprehensive literature review highlighting numerous motivations and necessities underlying the introduction of renewable energy policies. ...
2013| Felix Groba, Barbara Breitschopf
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DIW Discussion Papers 1317 / 2013
The interdependence of electricity and natural gas is becoming a major energy policy and regulatory issue in all jurisdictions around the world. The increased role of gas fired plants in renewable-based electricity markets and the dependence on gas imports make this issue particular striking for the European energy market. In this paper we provide a comprehensive combined analysis of electricity and ...
2013| Jan Abrell, Clemens Gerbaulet, Franziska Holz, Casimir Lorenz, Hannes Weigt
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DIW Discussion Papers 1316 / 2013
We examine the effects of future renewable expansion in Germany on residual load and renewable surplus generation for policy-relevant scenarios for 2022, 2032 and 2050. We also determine the storage capacities required for taking up renewable surpluses for varying levels of accepted curtailment. Making use of extensive sensitivity analyses, our simulations show that the expansion of variable renewables ...
2013| Wolf-Peter Schill
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DIW Discussion Papers 1314 / 2013
Since 2003 German hospitals are reimbursed according to diagnosis related groups (DRGs). Patient classification in neonatology is based inter alia on birth weight, with substantial discontinuities in reimbursement at eight different thresholds. These discontinuities create strong incentives to upcode preterm infants into classes of lower birth weight. Using data from the German birth statistics 1996 ...
2013| Hendrik Jürges, Juliane Köberlein
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DIW Discussion Papers 1313 / 2013
This article proposes a two-stage oligopoly model for the crude oil market. In a game of several Stackelberg leaders, market power increases endogenously as the spare capacity of the competitive fringe goes down. This effect is due to the specific cost function characteristics of extractive industries. The model captures the increase of OPEC market power before the financial crisis and its drastic ...
2013| Daniel Huppmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1312 / 2013
We analyze various regulatory regimes for electricity transmission investment in the context of a transformation of the power system towards renewable energy. We study distinctive developments of the generation mix with different implications on network congestion, assuming that a shift from conventional power plants towards renewables may go along with exogenous shocks on transmission requirements, ...
2013| Jonas Egerer, Juan Rosellón, Wolf-Peter Schill
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DIW Discussion Papers 1311 / 2013
Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of public referenda. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiatives. Based on municipality-level data for Germany, we make use of legislative changes at specific population thresholds to build an identification strategy using a regression discontinuity design. We find ...
2013| Felix Arnold, Ronny Freier
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DIW Discussion Papers 1310 / 2013
This paper empirically evaluates the price effects of the merger of two major book retail chains in the UK: Waterstone's and Ottakar's. We employ differences-in-differences techniques and use a rich dataset containing monthly scanner data information on a sample of 200 books sold in 60 stores in 50 different local markets for a period of four years around the merger. Since retail mergers may have either ...
2013| Luca Aguzzoni, Elena Argentesi, Lorenzo Ciari, Tomaso Duso, Massimo Tognoni
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DIW Discussion Papers 1309 / 2013
This paper analyses macroeconomic and financial determinants of bad loans applying a SVAR approach to investigate whether excessive loans granted during expansionary phases can explain the more than proportional increase in non-performing loans during contractionary periods. The results indicate that the effects of a permanent shock to bad loans on the excess of credit are significant and persistent ...
2013| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Stefano Di Colli, Juan Sergio Lopez
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DIW Discussion Papers 1308 / 2013
Scenarios of future energy systems attribute an important role to Carbon Capture, Transport, and Storage (CCTS) in achieving emission reductions. Using captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) can improve the economics of the technology. This paper examines the potential for CO2-EOR in the North Sea region. UK oil fields are found to account for 47% of the estimated total additional recovery ...
2013| Roman Mendelevitch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1307 / 2013
In many federations, fiscal equalization schemes soften fiscal imbalances across the member states. Such schemes usually imply that the member states internalize only a small fraction of the additional tax revenue from an expansion of the state-specific tax bases, while the remainder of the additional tax revenue is redistributed horizontally or vertically. We address the question as to which extent ...
2013| Timm Bönke, Beate Jochimsen, Carsten Schröder
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DIW Discussion Papers 1306 / 2013
This paper provides new evidence on migrant networks as determinants of the total size (scale) and skill structure of migration, using aggregate data from a recent migration boom to Spain. We draw upon McFadden (1984, 1422-1428) in order to develop and apply a three-level nested multinomial logit migration model. Our model accommodates varying degrees of similarity of destinations located in the same ...
2013| Nina Neubecker, Marcel Smolka, Anne Steinbacher
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DIW Discussion Papers 1305 / 2013
This paper studies how organizational design affects moral outcomes. Subjects face the decision to either kill mice for money or to save mice. We compare a Baseline treatment where subjects are fully pivotal to a Diffused-Pivotality treatment where subjects simultaneously choose in groups of eight. In the latter condition eight mice are killed if at least one subject opts for killing. The fraction ...
2013| Armin Falk, Nora Szech
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DIW Discussion Papers 1304 / 2013
The paper analyses the global spillovers of the Federal Reserve's unconventional monetary policy measures. First, we find that Fed measures in the early phase of the crisis (QE1), but not since 2010 (QE2), were highly effective in lowering sovereign yields and raising equity markets in the US and globally across 65 countries. Yet Fed policies functioned in a procyclical manner for capital flows to ...
2013| Marcel Fratzscher, Marco Lo Duca, Roland Straub
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DIW Discussion Papers 1303 / 2013
This study presents comprehensive macroeconomic measures on the revenue from business taxation in Germany. A comparison of the tax base reported in tax statistics with the corporate income derived from national accounts gives hints to considerable tax base erosion. The high weight of reported tax losses underlines this result. The average implicit tax rate on corporate income was around 21 percent ...
2013| Stefan Bach
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DIW Discussion Papers 1302 / 2013
This paper takes a financial market perspective in examining the relationship between oil prices, the US dollar and asset prices, and it exploits the heteroskedasticity for the identification of causality in a multifactor model. It finds a bidirectional causality between the US dollar and oil prices since the early 2000s. Moreover, both oil prices and the US dollar are significantly affected by changes ...
2013| Marcel Fratzscher, Daniel Schneider, Ine Van Robays
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DIW Discussion Papers 1301 / 2013
In northern Europe wind energy has become a dominating renewable energy source due to natural conditions and national support schemes. However, the uncertainty about wind generation affects existing network infrastructure and power production planning of generators and cannot not be fully diminished by wind forecasts. In this paper we develop a stochastic electricity market model to analyze the impact ...
2013| Jan Abrell, Friedrich Kunz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1300 / 2013
This paper examines the performance of 358 European diversified equity mutual funds controlling for gender differences. Fund performance is evaluated against funds' designated market indices and representative style portfolios. Consistently with previous studies, no significant differences in performance and risk are found between female and male managed funds. However, perverse market timing manifests ...
2013| Vassilios Babalos, Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Nikolaos Philippas
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DIW Discussion Papers 1299 / 2013
The European climate targets until 2050 require an adaptation of the generation portfolio in terms of renewable and fossil based generation. Assumptions on the timeline of the targets and the availability and costs of generation technologies are used in energy system models to optimize the cost minimal system transformation. The results include investments in generation technologies and their national ...
2013| Jonas Egerer, Clemens Gerbaulet, Casimir Lorenz