Vorträge des DIW Berlin

The Impact of Introducing an Interest Barrier: Evidence from the German Corporation Tax Reform 2008

In this study we investigate the impact of the thin capitalization rule (TCR), introduced in Germany in 2008, on firms' capital structure, investment and profitability. The identification of the causal effects is based on the escape clauses in the regulation using a difference-in-difference approach. Our results present evidence that firms strongly react in order to avoid the limited deductibility...

Do Parties Matter? Estimating the Effect of Political Power in Multi-party Systems

This paper estimates the effect of political power on tax policies in municipal councils under a proportional election system. The main challenge in estimating the causal effect of parties on policy is to isolate the effect of power from underlying voter preferences and the selection effect of parties. We use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation...

The Design of Unemployment Transfers: Evidence from a Dynamic Structural Life-Cycle Model

In this paper we use a dynamic structural life-cycle model to analyze the employment, fiscal and welfare effects induced by unemployment insurance. The model features a detailed specification of the tax and transfer system, including unemployment insurance benefits which depend on an individual's employment and earnings history. The model also captures the endogenous accumulation of experience...

Bank Risk-Taking and Monetary Policy: Regional Evidence from U.S. Commercial Banks

Lifetime Earnings Inequality in Germany

This paper documents the magnitude, pattern, and evolution of lifetime earnings inequality in Germany. Based on a large sample of earning biographies from social security records, we show that the intra-generational distribution of lifetime earnings of male workers has a Gini coefficient around .2 for cohorts born in the late 1930s and early 1940s; this amounts to about 2/3 of the value of the...

The Effect of Involuntary Unemployment on the Mental Health of Spouses

Estimating the Employment Effects of a Minimum Wage from a Cross-Sectional Wage Distribution: A Semi-Parametric Approach

On the basis of a structural labor demand model employment effects of a minimum wage are estimated from a single cross-sectional wage distribution. The main contribution of the paper is to relax restrictive functional form assumptions of earlier papers by introducing more flexible semi-parametric censored quantile regressions to this framework. We apply the model to the sectoral minimum wage in...

Which Outputs Are Relevant? Defining Technology Sets in Nonparametric Efficiency Analysis by Testing Restrictions

Liquidity Constraints and the Permanent Income Hypothesis: Pseudo Panel Estimation with German Consumption Survey Data

This paper empirically investigates the relevance of liquidity constraints and excess sensitivity in intertemporal household consumption. Using a pseudo panel that has been constructed on rich German consumption survey data, we estimate the consumption responses to permanent and transitory income shocks, as well as the presence of excess sensitivity to anticipated income changes. A switching...

Do Absolute Majorities Spend Less? Evidence from Germany

The number of parties in government is usually considered to increase spending. We show that this is not necessarily the case. Using a new method to detect close election outcomes in multi-party systems, we isolate truly exogenous variation in the type of government. With data from municipalities in the German state of Bavaria, we show in regression discontinuity-type estimations that absolute...

Liquidity Crises, Banking, and the Great Recession

Trade and the Environment: The Role of Firm Heterogeneity

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,...

Estimating Heterogeneous Returns to Education in Germany via Conditional Second Moments

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...

Wage Mobility in East and West Germany

An Electricity Market Model with Generation Capacity Investment under Uncertainty

This article presents an electricity dispatch model with endogenous electricity generation capacity expansion for Germany over the horizon 2035. The target is to quantify how fuel price uncertainty impacts investment incentives of thermal power plants. Results point to findings which are in line with general theory: Accounting for stochasticity increases investment levels overall and the...

How Do Taxes Affect Investment When Firms Face Financial Constraints?

This study uses a switching regression framework with known sample separation to analyze the effects of corporate income taxation on investment in case of binding and non-binding financial constraints. By employing two different sample splitting criteria, payout behavior and the ratio of liabilities to total assets, I show that the elasticity of capital to its user costs in an auto-distributed-lag...

Labor Supply of Mothers with Young Children: Validating a Structural Model Using a Natural Experiment

Electricity Generation and Transmission Capacity Expansion: An Application to the Central European Region

Responsive Adjustment of Feed-in Tariffs to Dynamic PV Technology Development

This paper reviews the adjustments of the feed-in tariff for new solar photovoltaics (PV) installations in Germany. As PV system prices declined rapidly over the last years, the German government implemented automatic mechanisms to adjust the support level for new installations in response to deployment volumes. This paper develops an analytic model to simulate weekly installations of PV systems ?...

Chinese Renewable Energy Technology Exports: The Role of Policy, Markets and Innovation