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DIW Discussion Papers 1960 / 2021
In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by micro and small firms, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. This productivity decline also holds true for professional services in other European countries. Using a German firm-level dataset of 700,000 observations between 2003 and 2017, we analyze this largely uncovered phenomenon among professional services, the ...
2021| Alexander S. Kritikos, Alexander Schiersch, Caroline Stiel
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DIW Discussion Papers 1915 / 2020
We construct a novel database of monthly foreign exchange interventions for 49 countries over up to 22 years. We build on a text classification approach that extracts information about interventions from news articles and calibrate our procedure to data about actual interventions. Our new dataset allows us to document stylized facts about the use of foreign exchange interventions for countries that ...
2020| Marcel Fratzscher, Tobias Heidland, Lukas Menkhoff, Lucio Sarno, Maik Schmeling
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DIW Discussion Papers 1774 / 2018
A rich literature links knowledge inputs with innovative outputs. However, most of what is known is restricted to manufacturing. This paper analyzes whether the three aspects involving innovative activity - R&D; innovative output; and productivity - hold for knowledge intensive services. Combining the models of Crepon et al. (1998) and of Ackerberg et al. (2015), allows for causal interpretation of ...
2018| David B. Audretsch, Marian Hafenstein, Alexander S. Kritikos, Alexander Schiersch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1764 / 2018
Tests for identification through heteroskedasticity in structural vector autoregressive analysis are developed for models with two volatility states where the time point of volatility change is known. The tests are Wald type tests for which only the unrestricted model including the covariance matrices of the two volatility states have to be estimated. The residuals of the model are assumed to be from ...
2018| Helmut Lütkepohl, Mika Meitz, Aleksei NetŠunajev, Pentti Saikkonen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1763 / 2018
The human personality predicts a wide range of activities and occupational choices—from musical sophistication to entrepreneurial careers. However, which method should be applied if information on personality traits is used for prediction and advice? In psychological research, group profiles are widely employed. In this contribution, we examine the performance of profiles using the example of career ...
2018| Alexander Konon, Alexander Kritikos
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DIW Discussion Papers 1762 / 2018
Methods for constructing joint confidence bands for impulse response functions which are commonly used in vector autoregressive analysis are reviewed. While considering separate intervals for each horizon individually still seems to be the most common approach, a substantial number of methods have been proposed for making joint inferences about the complete impulse response paths up to a given horizon. ...
2018| Helmut Lütkepohl, Anna Staszewska-Bystrova, Peter Winker
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DIW Discussion Papers 1759 / 2018
With the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events due to climate change, assessing the potential long-term effects of these events for affected households is critically important. This study analyzes to what extent a one-off extreme weather event can have persistent effects on household-level asset growth. Our focus is on the effect of a once-in-50-year winter disaster on post-shock ...
2018| Katharina Lehmann-Uschner, Kati Krähnert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1758 / 2018
The paper extends a static discrete-choice labor supply model by adding participation and hours constraints. We identify restrictions by survey information on the eligibility and search activities of individuals as well as actual and desired hours. This provides for a more robust identification of preferences and constraints. Both, preferences and restrictions are allowed to vary by and are related ...
2018| Kai-Uwe Müller, Michael Neumann, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1750 / 2018
Different bootstrap methods and estimation techniques for inference for structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) models identified by conditional heteroskedasticity are reviewed and compared in a Monte Carlo study. The model is a SVAR model with generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedastic (GARCH) innovations. The bootstrap methods considered are a wild bootstrap, a moving blocks bootstrap ...
2018| Helmut Lütkepohl, Thore Schlaak
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DIW Discussion Papers 1747 / 2018
Expanding public or publicly subsidized childcare has been a top social policy priority in many industrialized countries. It is supposed to increase fertility, promote children's development and enhance mothers' labor market attachment. In this paper, we analyze the causal effect of one of the largest expansions of subsidized childcare for children up to three years among industrialized countries on ...
2018| Kai-Uwe Müller, Katharina Wrohlich