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DIW Discussion Papers 1238 / 2012
Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have a skewed distribution of outcomes. A simple laboratory experiment shows that participants either strongly underestimate skewness or ignore it completely. The participants' choices reveal bounds on their subjective medians of a financial asset's price that is subject to stochastic growth. The observed bias in expectations is ...
2012| Ludwig Ensthaler, Olga Nottmeyer, Georg Weizsäcker
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DIW Discussion Papers 1237 / 2012
The literature argues that research spin-offs (RSOs)-enterprises originating from a university or research institute-appear to have higher innovative potential and capabilities than other start-ups, at least in the early stages of their development. Yet, little is known about the innovative performance of these companies at later development phases. Thus, the main goal of this study is to investigate ...
2012| Anna Lejpras
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DIW Discussion Papers 1236 / 2012
Over the past decade, research explaining cross country income differences has increasingly pointed to the dominant role of total factor productivity (TFP) gaps as opposed to factor accumulation. Nevertheless, it is a widely held belief that a country's ability to absorb and implement technologies is tied to its human capital. In this paper, we implement this idea in a novel specification and explore ...
2012| Areendam Chanda, Beatrice Farkas
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DIW Discussion Papers 1235 / 2012
It is emphasized that the shocks in structural vector autoregressions are only identified up to sign and it is pointed out that this feature can result in very misleading confidence intervals for impulse responses if simulation methods such as Bayesian or bootstrap methods are used. The confidence intervals heavily depend on which variable is used for fixing the sign of the initial responses. In particular, ...
2012| Helmut Lütkepohl
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DIW Discussion Papers 1234 / 2012
Microsimulation methods and models of labor market decisions have attracted a lot of attention as an approach to the assessment of consequences of family related policies in the area of labor market and fertility. We set these models in the context of relevant demographic theories and present them from the point of view of their potential as tool to guide effective policy making with the aim to reconcile ...
2012| Anna Kurowska, Michal Myck, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1233 / 2012
The recession the United States economy entered in December of 2007 is considered to be the most severe downturn the country has experienced since the Great Depression. In this paper we decompose the changes in the unemployment rate by examining worker ows into and out of unemployment during the last four recessions in the United States with a special focus on the industry groups. Since the most recent ...
2012| Yelena Takhtamanova, Eva Sierminska
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DIW Discussion Papers 1232 / 2012
In this paper we examine the role of mortgage equity withdrawal in explaining the decline of the US saving rate, since when house prices rise and mortgage rates are low, homeowners have an incentive to withdraw housing equity and this may affect the saving rate. We estimate a Vector Error Correction (VEC) model including the saving rate, asset prices, equity withdrawal and interest rates and find that ...
2012| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Mauro Costantini, Antonio Paradiso
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DIW Discussion Papers 1231 / 2012
This paper empirically investigates the relevance of liquidity constraints and excess sensitivity in intertemporal household consumption. Using a pseudo panel that has been constructed on rich German consumption survey data, we estimate the consumption responses to permanent and transitory income shocks, as well as the presence of excess sensitivity to anticipated income changes. A switching regression ...
2012| Martin Beznoska, Richard Ochmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1230 / 2012
Economic agents using information that is not incorporated in the econometric model is seen as a possible reason for why nonfundamental shocks are important in econometric models. Allowing for nonfundamental shocks in structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) analysis by considering moving average (MA) representations with roots in the complex unit circle is a possible response to the problem. A case ...
2012| Helmut Lütkepohl
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DIW Discussion Papers 1229 / 2012
This paper investigates the links between locational conditions, innovative capabilities and internationalization of manufacturing SMEs. Two modes of foreign market servicing are explored: exporting activity and relocating of selected business activities abroad. The empirical analysis employs two probit models based on survey of about 3,000 firms. The results reveal that the outputs of SMEs' innovative ...
2012| Anna Lejpras
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DIW Discussion Papers 1228 / 2012
This paper investigates the impact of uncertainty on an irreversible investment decisions in the laboratory. Subjects own the option to seize a claim on the future sum of realizations from an (ambiguous) random walk. I contrast model predicitions of the Subjective Expected Utility model (SEU, Savage, 1954) with model predictions made by Multiple-prior Expected Utility models (MEU, Gilboa & Schmeidler, ...
2012| Paul Viefers
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DIW Discussion Papers 1227 / 2012
We calculate the expected incidence of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU-ETS) using industry and household-level data. By combining data on direct CO2 emissions by production sector from the German Environmental Account with the German Input-Output Accounts, we calculate the CO2 intensity of each sector covered by the EU-ETS. We focus on the impact of price increases in the electricity ...
2012| Martin Beznoska, Johanna Cludius, Viktor Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1226 / 2012
It is still an open question whether increasing life expectancy as such is causing higher health care expenditures (HCE) in a population. According to the "red herring" hypothesis, the positive correlation between age and HCE is exclusively due to the fact that mortality rises with age and a large share of HCE is caused by proximity to death. As a consequence, rising longevity - through falling mortality ...
2012| Friedrich Breyer, Normann Lorenz, Thomas Niebel
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DIW Discussion Papers 1225 / 2012
Monetary policy rules have been considered as fundamental protection against inflation. However, empirical evidence for a correlation between rules and inflation is relatively weak. In this paper, we first discuss likely causes for this weak link and present the argument that monetary commitment is not credible in itself. It can grant price stability best if it is backed by an adequate assignment of ...
2012| Ansgar Belke, Andreas Freytag, Jonas Keil, Friedrich Schneider
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DIW Discussion Papers 1224 / 2012
We investigate the persistence of levels of self-employment and new business formation in different time periods and under different framework conditions. The analysis shows that high levels of regional self-employment and new business formation tend to be persistent for periods as long as 80 years and that such an entrepreneurial culture can even survive abrupt and drastic changes in the politic-economic ...
2012| Michael Fritsch, Michael Wyrwich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1223 / 2012
This study puts the monetary transmission process in the eurozone between 2003 and 2011 under closer scrutiny. For this purpose, we investigate the interest rate pass-through from money market to various loan rates for up to twelve countries of the European Monetary Union. Applying different cointegration techniques, we first test for a long-run relationship between loan rates and the Euro OverNight ...
2012| Ansgar Belke, Joscha Beckmann, Florian Verheyen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1222 / 2012
In some countries including Germany unemployed workers can increase their income during job search by taking up "marginal employment" up to a threshold without any deduction from their benefits. Marginal employment can be considered as a wage subsidy as it lowers labour costs for firms owing to reduced social security contributions, and increases work incentives due to higher net earnings. Additional ...
2012| Marco Caliendo, Steffen Künn, Arne Uhlendorff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1221 / 2012
This paper examines the contemporaneous relationship between the exchange rate regime and structural economic reforms for a sample of CEEC/CIS transition countries. We investigate empirically whether structural reforms are complements or substitutes for monetary commitment in the attempt to improve macroeconomic performance. Both EBRD and EFW data suggest a negative relationship between flexible exchange ...
2012| Ansgar Belke, Lukas Vogel
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DIW Discussion Papers 1220 / 2012
The life-cycle hypothesis implies that consumption would not decline at retirement. However, several studies found relevant declines in food consumption after retirement for the United States. Others concluded that this contradiction of the life-cycle hypothesis is solved by allowing for broader measures of consumption than food. Using repeated cross-section data for Germany, this paper analyzes the ...
2012| Martin Beznoska, Viktor Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1219 / 2012
The German decision to finally phase-out nuclear electricity has led to a debate on its effects on electricity prices, emission prices in the European emission trading system, as well as on international electricity trade. We investigate these effects with a Electricity market model for Europe with investments in power plants under oligopolistic conditions in Germany. We find modest price increases ...
2012| Thure Traber, Claudia Kemfert