Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Determinants and Welfare Effects of Smallholder Export Participation in Kyrgyzstan

Übergang in ein Erneuerbaren-Energiesystem: wirtschaftlich sinnvoll und ein wichtiger Schritt in die Energie-Unabhängigkeit

Measuring Ambiguity Aversion

International Interventions to Build Social Capital: Evidence from a Field Experiment in Sudan

Is It the Family or the Neighborhood? Family and Neighbor Correlations in Youth Education and Health

Hidden Skewness: On the Difficulty of Multiplicative Compounding under Random Shocks

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have a skewed distribution of outcomes. In a number of incentivized laboratory experiments we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimate skewness or ignore it completely. Participants misperceive the outcome distribution's spread to be far too narrow-band and they estimate the median to lie too...

Confidence Bands for Impulse Responses: Bonferroni versus Wald

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...

Analyzing Economic Policies that Affect Supply and Demand: A Structural Model of Productivity, Labor Supply and Rationing

In this paper a labor supply model with demand side rationing is estimated to analyze the economic policies that directly affect incentives to work as well as labor costs. The framework is applied to evaluate the employment effects of a federal minimum wage in Germany and the impact of employervs. employee-oriented wage subsidies under a statutory minimum. We extend Laroque and Salanié (2002) by...

Natural Disaster, Policy Action, and Mental Well-Being: The Case of Fukushima

We study the impact of the Fukushima disaster on people's mental well-being in another industrialized country, more than 5000 miles distant. The meltdown significantly increased environmental concerns by 20% among the German population. Subsequent drastic policy action permanently shut down the oldest nuclear reactors, implemented the phase-out of the remaining ones, and proclaimed the transition...

Comparison of Feed-in Tariffs and Tenders to Remunerate Solar Power Generation

This paper analyzes the trade-offs for using feed-in tariffs or tenders to remunerate different scales of solar photovoltaics (PV) projects. In recent years, European . - countries increasingly combined feed-in tariffs for small renewables systems with tenders for large installations. This study develops an analytic framework to quantify . - deployment effectiveness of responsive feed-in tariff...

Optimal Unemployment Insurance and Welfare Benefits in a Life-Cycle Model of Family Labor Supply and Savings

We specify and estimate a dynamic structural life-cycle model of labor supply, retirement and savings decisions of single-adult and couple households. Drawing on our model, we study the interplay between family labor supply and public insurance mechanisms. By including family labor supply, we recognize that the incentive effects and optimal design of publicinsurance programs may be impacted by a...

Adverse Effects of Increased Education Efficiency? The Impact of Shortening High School Tenure on Graduation Age, Grade Repetitions and Graduation Rates

In designing education systems, policy-makers face a trade-off between the provision of higher levels of schooling and earlier labour market entries. A fundamental education reform in Germany tackles this trade-off by increasing education efficiency: The time in high school is reduced by one year while the total number of instruction hours is left unchanged. Employing administrative data on all...

The Introduction of Disincentives for Early Retirement and Its Effect on Labor Market Participation

We evaluate the actual effectiveness of disincentives that have been introduced for early retirement in Germany. Therefore, we set up a detailed model of the German social security and tax system with special attention to the PAYG-pension system. Building on the fact that the institutional changes were phased in, impacting birth cohorts to a different degree we are able to estimate the parameters...

Illiquidity Risk and Liquidity Regulation

This paper studies the following questions related to the liquidity regulation of banks and financial intermediaries. (a) Under which circumstances does liquidity underinsurance occur,so that liquidity regulation is necessarily required? (b) Is regulation the most efficient way to mitigate underinsurance? (c) How does liquidity regulation interact with other regulatory measures and the liquidity...

Asymmetric Information and Rollover Risk

How do banks choose their debt maturity structure when credit markets are subject to information frictions? This paper proposes a model of equilibrium maturity choice with asymmetric information and endogenous roll-over risk. We show that in the presence of public signals about firms' creditworthiness (credit ratings), firms choose to expose themselves to positive roll-over risk in order to...

Gas, Tax and Cars: How Does Differential Fuel Taxation Impact New Car Purchases?

This paper sets out to identify the impact of fuel taxes on new car purchases, using exhaustive individual-level data of monthly registration of new private cars in France from 2003 to 2007. Detailed information on the car holder enables us to account for heterogeneous preferences across purchasers. We find that sensitivity of short-term demand with respect to fuel prices is generally low....

Regional versus Bilateral Cost Sharing in Electricity Transmission Expansion

The costs of cross-border transmission links have traditionally been shared equally between the two involved countries. However, capacity expansions are likely to create positive and negative externalities on a larger scale for all countries in a meshed electricity network. In this paper we compare a regional cost sharing framework (i.e., proportional allocation) to the traditional bilateral...

Financial Development and Employment

This paper studies the association between a country's level of financial development and firms' employment growth. We employ an incomplete contract model for evaluating this association. The model proposes that a high level of financial development affects the employment of firms with low managerial capital negatively, while firms with high managerial capital benefit from a more developed...

Productivity in German Manufacturing Firms: Does Fixed-Term Employment Matter?

A growing proportion of employees are working under fixed-term contracts. This paper empirically analyzes whether this strategy actually improves firm productivity. To this end, a largedata set of German manufacturing firms and various panel data models are used in order to reveal the expected non-linear effect. Thereby the analysis also takes into account distortions that may result from...

The Impact of Extreme Weather Events on Child Health: Evidence from Mongolia

We provide new evidence on the impact of one severe weather shock on child height in Mongolia. Our focus is on the extremely harsh winter - locally referred to as dzud - of 2009/10, which caused more than 23 percent of the national livestock to perish. This resulted in a food insecurity situation for many Mongolian households. Our analysis identifies causal effects by exploiting exogenous...