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DIW Discussion Papers 1890 / 2020
Cities worldwide have regulated peer-to-peer short-term rental platforms claiming that those platforms remove apartments from the long-term housing market, causing an in- crease in rents. Establishing and quantifying such a causal link is, however, challenging. We investigate two policy changes in Berlin to first assess how effective they were in regulating Airbnb, the largest online peer-to-peer short-term ...
2020| Tomaso Duso, Claus Michelsen, Maximilian Schäfer, Kevin Ducbao Tran
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DIW Discussion Papers 1876 / 2020
In proxy vector autoregressive models, the structural shocks of interest are identified by an instrument. Although heteroskedasticity is occasionally allowed for, it is typically taken for granted that the impact effects of the structural shocks are time-invariant despite the change in their variances. We develop a test for this implicit assumption and present evidence that the assumption of time-invariant ...
2020| Helmut Lütkepohl, Thore Schlaak
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DIW Discussion Papers 1874 / 2020
A two-sector incomplete markets model with heterogeneous agents can be used to study the distributional effects of the COVID-19 lockdown. While negative aggregate welfare effects of the lockdown are unavoidable, the size of aggregate welfare effects as well as the distribution of the welfare effects across agents turn out to depend on the specific economic environment of the affected economy as well ...
2020| Marius Clemens, Maik Heinemann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1873 / 2020
Recent proposals for a still missing European deposit insurance scheme (EDIS) argue in favor of a reinsurance framework. In this paper, we use a regime-switching open-economy DSGE model with bank default to assess the relative efficiency of such a scheme. We find that reinsurance by EDIS is more effective in stabilizing real activity, credit, and welfare than a national fiscal backstop. We demonstrate ...
2020| Marius Clemens, Stefan Gebauer, Tobias König
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DIW Discussion Papers 1861 / 2020
We construct a news-based viral disease index and study the dynamic impact of epidemics on the world economy, using structural vector autoregressions. Epidemic shocks have persistently negative effects, both directly and indirectly, on affected countries and on world output. The shocks lead to a significant fall in global trade, employment, and consumer prices for three quarters, and the losses are ...
2020| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Malte Rieth
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DIW Discussion Papers 1852 / 2020
This paper examines the dynamics of wealth and income inequality along the business cycle and assesses how they are related to fluctuations in the functional income distribution. In a panel estimation for OECD countries between 1970 and 2016 we find that on average income inequality - measured by the Gini coefficient - is countercyclical and also shows a significant association with the capital share. ...
2020| Marius Clemens, Ulrich Eydam, Maik Heinemann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1846 / 2020
Following World War I, rent control became a standard policy response to the housing shortage and the resulting rent increases. Typically, economists blame it for creating inefficiencies in the housing market and beyond. We investigate whether rental market regulations (including rent control, protection of tenants from eviction, and housing rationing) had any effects in a middle-income Latin American ...
2020| Alejandro D. Jacobo, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1842 / 2020
Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MARS) is a simple and powerful non-parametric technique that automatizes the selection of non-linear terms in regression models. Non-linearities and spatial effects are natural characteristics in numerous spatial hedonic pricing models. In this paper, we propose using the MARS data-driven methodology combined with the Instrumental Variables method in order to ...
2020| Fernando A. López, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1839 / 2020
The (re-)introduction of rent regulation in the form of rent controls, tenant protection or supply rationing is back on the agenda of policymakers in light of rent inflation in many global cities. While rent control as social policy promises short-term relief, economists point to their negative long-run effects on new construction. This paper present long-run data on both rent regulation and housing ...
2020| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Sebastian Kohl
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DIW Discussion Papers 1832 / 2019
This paper studies market segmentation that arises from the introduction of a price ceiling in the market for rental housing. When part of the market faces rent control, theory predicts an increase of free-market rents, a consequence of misallocation of households to housing units. We study a large-scale policy intervention in the German housing market in 2015 to document this mechanism empirically. ...
2019| Andreas Mense, Claus Michelsen, Konstantin A. Kholodilin