Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Cost Efficiency and Subsidization in German Local Public Bus Transit

Subsidies are considered important means to facilitate the provision of public transit, yet the empirical evidence implies that they can have harming effects on costs and possibly also on operators' performance. This paper examines the impacts of deficit-balancing subsidies on the cost inefficiency of local public bus companies in Germany, where a complex system allocates ample financial support....

Distributional and Welfare Effects of Germany's Year 2000 Tax Reform

This paper empirically investigates distributional and welfare effects of Germany's year 2000 income tax reform. The reform is simulated in an ex-ante behavioral microsimulation approach. Dead weight loss of changes in capital income taxation is estimated in a structural model for household savings and asset demand applied to German survey data. Significant reductions in tax rates result in income...

Regulated Transmission Expansion in Electricity Networks: The Effects of Fluctuating Demand and Wind Generation

We study the performance of different regulatory approaches for the expansion of electricity transmission networks in the light of realistic demand patterns and fluctuating wind power. In particular, we are interested in the relative performance of a combined merchant-regulatory mechanism compared to a cost-based and a merchant-like approach. In contrast to earlier research, we explicitly include...

Industry-Specific Knowledge Spurs Productivity: An Application of Panel Cointegration

Personality, Politics, and Partnership

Wie "regressiv" ist die Mehrwertsteuer und wie soll dieser Effekt gemildert werden? Verteilungswirkungen des ermäßigten Mehrwertsteuersatzes und alternativer Modelle

Die Planungsparameter für den Ausbau des konventionellen Kraftwerksparks

Die Herausforderungen für das deutsche Energiesystem nach Fukushima: Podiumsdiskussion

Looking for Jobs with Good Pay and Good Working Conditions

In perfectly competitive labour markets, there is a market for non-material job amenities in which workers' willingness to pay for these goods implies that workers accept compensating wage differentials, such that jobs with better working conditions should have lower wages. In labour market characterised by frictions, workers' wages typically depend also on firm productivity. However many job...

Le rapport aux institutions des descendants d'immigrés

Der Umbau der Energieerzeugung in Deutschland - Operation am offenen Herzen?

Is There a Bubble in the Chinese Housing Market?

For many analysts, the Chinese economy is spurred by a bubble in the housing market, probably driven by the fiscal stimulus package and massive credit expansion, with pos-sible adverse effects to the real economy. To get insights into the size of the bubble, the house price evolution is investigated by panel cointegration techniques. Evidence is based on a dataset for 35 major cities....

Regional Patterns of Intangible Capital, Agglomeration Effects and Localised Spillovers in Germany

We use a large micro-dataset to assess the importance of intangible capital - organisation, R&D and ICT capital - for the economic performance of establishments and regions in Germany. In 2003 self-produced intangible capital accounted for more than one fifth of the total capital stock of estab-lishments. More than half of the intangible capital is R&D capital. This high proportion is mainly due...

Do Regions with Entrepreneurial Neighbors Perform Better? A Spatial Econometric Approach for German Regions

We use a neoclassical production function to analyze the effects of knowledge spillovers via entrepreneurship on economic performance of 337 German districts. To take the spatial dependence structure of the data into account, we estimate a spatial Durbin model. We highlight the importance of the choice of the appropriate weight matrix. We find positive knowledge spillover effects via...

Home Learning Environment and Emotional Development in the Preschool Years: A Child Centered Approach

The Strategic Use of Private Quality Standards in Food Supply Chains

This paper highlights the strategic role that private quality standards play in food supply chains. Considering two symmetric retailers that are exclusively supplied by a finite number of producers and endogenizing the producers' delivery choice, we show that there exist two asymmetric equilibria in the retailers' quality requirements. The asymmetry is driven by both the retailers.incentive to...

Die wirtschaftlichen Chancen einer klugen Energiewende

Die wirtschaftlichen Chancen einer klugen Energiewende

Mobilization by Opportunity? Direct Democracy and Political Engagement

Speculative Partnership Dissolution with Auctions

The literature on partnership dissolution generally takes the dissolution decision as given and examines whether dissolution is efficient, i.e., whether the asset is allocated to the partner with the highest valuation. A well-known result is that k + 1-price auctions dissolve a partnership efficiently when the share structure is sufficiently close to equal. In this paper, we endogenize the...