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DIW Discussion Papers 1198 / 2012
We argue that a financial transaction tax complements financial market regulation. With the tax, governments have an additional instrument at hand to influence trading activity. FTT aims to reduce regulatory arbitrage, flash trading, overactive portfolio management, excessive leverage and speculative transactions of financial institutions. The focus clearly addresses these classes of activities that ...
2012| Dorothea Schäfer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1197 / 2012
The paper explores factors that influence the household decision to leave internal displacement camps in the immediate aftermath of violent conflict. Our analysis is based on two sources of information: household survey data collected in northern Uganda for households that were displaced by the civil conflict, and geo-referenced data on armed conflict events, with which we construct our developed index ...
2012| Carlos Bozzoli, Tilman Brück, Tony Muhumuza
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DIW Discussion Papers 1196 / 2012
In the European Emission Trading scheme the supply of allowances exceeds emissions - cumulating, according to our estimates, in a surplus of 2.7 billion tonnes by 2013/2014. We find that initially the surplus was acquired by power companies so as to hedge future carbon costs. As the surplus exceeds this hedging demand, additional allowances need to be acquired as speculative investment. This requires ...
2012| Karsten Neuhoff, Anne Schopp, Rodney Boyd, Kateryna Stelmakh, Alexander Vasa
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DIW Discussion Papers 1195 / 2012
Given the growing dissatisfaction with exclusion and long-run restrictions in structural vector autoregressive analysis, sign restrictions are becoming increasingly popular. So far there are no techniques for validating the shocks identified via such restrictions. Although in an ideal setting the sign restrictions specify shocks of interest, sign restrictions may be invalidated by measurement errors, ...
2012| Helmut Lütkepohl, Aleksei Netsunajev
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DIW Discussion Papers 1194 / 2012
This article investigates the understandings and perceptions of (micro)insurance among low-income people in southern Ghana, using evidence from four focus group discussions. It analyzes how the focus group participants think about various types of insurance - among them a micro life insurance product - and how their negative and/or positive evaluations have come about. The evidence indicates that (micro)insurance ...
2012| Lena Giesbert, Susan Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1193 / 2012
Empirical evidence so far found ambiguous results for the direction of effect of marginal income tax rates on employee remuneration. Based on the GSOEP data from 2002 through 2008 this study analyzes the impact of the marginal tax load on the employee side on the wage rate also allowing average tax rates and employer payroll taxes to play a role. Instrumental variable estimation based on counterfactual ...
2012| Pia Rattenhuber
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DIW Discussion Papers 1192 / 2012
Sub-Saharan Africa ranks among the top regions in terms of growth in the number of mobile phone users. The success of mobile telephony is attributed to the opening of markets for private players and lenient regulatory policy. However, markets may be increasingly saturated and new regulations introduced across Africa could also have a negative impact on future growth. Since 2006, the majority of countries ...
2012| Nicola Jentzsch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1191 / 2012
In this paper, we suggest to estimate the home rents and prices in German regions/cities using the data from Internet ads offering the housing for rent and sale. Given the richness of information contained in the ads, we are able to construct the quality-adjusted rent and price indices using the hedonic approach. The results can be applied both for investigating the dynamics of rents/prices and for ...
2012| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Andreas Mense
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DIW Discussion Papers 1190 / 2012
Tax competition for the mobile factor capital has led to a trend in many countries to levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. In this study, we analyze the effect of such differential taxation on the debt ratio of firms. We exploit a 2009 tax reform in Germany as a quasi-experiment, which introduced a flat final withholding ...
2012| Frank M. Fossen, Martin Simmler
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DIW Discussion Papers 1189 / 2012
This paper reviews the adjustments of the feed-in tariff for new solar photovoltaics (PV) installations in Germany. As PV system prices declined rapidly over the last years, the German government implemented automatic mechanisms to adjust the support level for new installations in response to deployment volumes. This paper develops an analytic model to simulate weekly installations of PV systems ?30 ...
2012| Thilo Grau
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DIW Discussion Papers 1188 / 2012
The role and influence of the finance minister within the cabinet are discussed with increasing prominence in the recent theoretical literature on the political economy of budget deficits. It is generally assumed that the spending ministers can raise their reputation purely with new or more extensive expenditure programs, whereas solely the finance minister is interested to balance the budget. Using ...
2012| Beate R. Jochimsen, Sebastian Thomasius
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DIW Discussion Papers 1187 / 2012
The German potable water supply industry is regarded as being highly fragmented, thus inhibiting high potentials for efficiency improvements through consolidation. Focusing on a hypothetical restructuring of the industry, we apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to analyze the potential efficiency gains from mergers between water utilities at the county level. A conditional efficiency framework is ...
2012| Michael Zschille
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DIW Discussion Papers 1186 / 2012
This study examines the long-memory properties of German energy price indices (specifically, import and export prices, as well as producer and consumer prices) for hard coal, lignite, mineral oil and natural gas adopting a fractional integration modelling framework. The analysis is undertaken using monthly data from January 2000 to August 2011. The results suggest nonstationary long memory in the series ...
2012| Carlos P. Barros, Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana
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DIW Discussion Papers 1185 / 2012
Before 2004 South Africa was the dominant steam coal exporter to the European market. However a new market situation with rising global demand and prices makes room for a new entrant: Russia. The hypothesis investigated in this paper is that the three incumbent dominant firms located in South Africa and Colombia reacted to that new situation by exerting market power and withheld quantities from the ...
2012| Clemens Haftendorn
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DIW Discussion Papers 1184 / 2012
Based on representative data, the German Micro-Census, we provide an overview of the development of self-employment and entrepreneurship in Germany between 1991 and 2010, the first two decades after reunification. We investigate the socioeconomic background of these individuals, their education, previous employment status, and their income level. We observe a unique increase in self-employment in Germany ...
2012| Michael Fritsch, Alexander S. Kritikos, Alina Rusakova
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DIW Discussion Papers 1183 / 2012
Starting with a comparative assessment of different welfare regimes and political economies from the perspective of gender awareness and "pro-women" policies, this paper identifies the determinants of cross-national variation in women's chances of being in a high-status occupation in twelve West European countries. Special emphasis is given to size and structure of the service sector, including share ...
2012| Andrea Schäfer, Ingrid Tucci, Karin Gottschall
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DIW Discussion Papers 1182 / 2012
This paper empirically assesses whether the deployment and use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure at the national level affects trade flows within the European Union (EU) and between the EU and its main trading partners. The analysis tests the hypothesis that availability and use of ICT enhances trade by reducing transaction costs and through network effects that materialize ...
2012| Anselm Mattes, Philipp Meinen, Ferdinand Pavel
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DIW Discussion Papers 1181 / 2012
This study uses a switching regression framework with known sample separation to analyze the effects of corporate income taxation on investment in case of binding and non-binding financial constraints. By employing two different sample splitting criteria, payout behavior and the ratio of liabilities to total assets, I show that the elasticity of capital to its user costs in an auto-distributed-lag ...
2012| Martin Simmler
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DIW Discussion Papers 1180 / 2011
This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced monetary policy in OECD countries. We use quarterly data in the 1980.1-2005.4 period and exclude EMU countries. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant index of central bank independence with government ideology. The results show that leftist governments have somewhat lower short-term nominal interest ...
2011| Ansgar Belke, Niklas Potrafke
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DIW Discussion Papers 1179 / 2011
This paper investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans - in particular instalment loans and overdrafts - to finance business activities. Controlling for financial and non-financial household variables we show that self-employed households particularly use personal overdrafts significantly more often than employee households. When analyzing the correlation between consumer loan ...
2011| Christoph Kneiding, Alexander S. Kritikos