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DIW Discussion Papers 1269 / 2013
Die Bedeutung regionaler Unterschiede des Preisniveaus wird in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften unterschätzt. Lediglich in Form von "Mietspiegeln" werden regionale Preisniveauunterschiede lebensweltlich berücksichtigt. Wie experimentelle Berechnungen des Bundesinstituts für Bau-, Stadt- und Raumforschung (BBSR) zeigen, gibt es in Deutschland gegenwärtig nennenswerte Preisniveauunterschiede auf der Ebene ...
2013| Heinz Vortmann, Jan Goebel, Peter Krause, Gert G. Wagner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1259 / 2012
Identification of shocks of interest is a central problem in structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) modelling. Identification is often achieved by imposing restrictions on the impact or long-run effects of shocks or by considering sign restrictions for the impulse responses. In a number of articles changes in the volatility of the shocks have also been used for identification. The present study focusses ...
2012| Helmut Lütkepohl
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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 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 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 1214 / 2012
This paper derives a new effect of trade liberalisation on the quality of the environment. We show that in the presence of heterogeneous firms the aggregate volume of emissions is influenced not only by the long-established scale effect, but also by a reallocation effect resulting from an increase in the relative size of more productive firms. We show how the relative importance of these effects, and ...
2012| Udo Kreickemeier, Philipp M. Richter
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DIW Discussion Papers 1213 / 2012
In this paper I investigate the causal returns to education for different educational groups in Germany by employing a new method by Klein and Vella (2010) that bases identification on the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity. Compared to IV methods, key advantages of this approach are unbiased estimates in the absence of instruments and parameter interpretation that is not bounded to local average ...
2012| Nils Saniter
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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 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 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