Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Diskussionsteilnahme

Urbanization - Economic Dynamic and Social Problems

Association between Early Attendance of Day Care Centers and Prevalence of Eczema

Non-cognitive Skills and the Economics of Entrepreneurial Decision Making

Based on a large, representative German household panel, this paper investigates whether non-cognitive skills influence entrepreneurial decision making, in particular the entry and exit decision, the latter one thus capturing entrepreneurial survival. The analysis reveals that there are some variables that affect the economic decision of becoming an entrepreneur and different ones or different...

Disentangling Demand and Supply Shocks in the Crude Oil Market: How to Check Sign Restrictions in Structural VARs

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...

The Forward Premium Puzzle and Latent Factors Day by Day

We use futures instead of forward rates to study the complete maturity spectrum of the forward premium puzzle from two days to six months. At short maturities the slope coefficient is positive, but these turn negative as the maturity increases to the monthly level. Futures data allow us to control for the influence of an unobserved factor that can be decomposed into a contract-specific and a time-...

Financial Integration and Macroeconomic Stability: What Role for Large Banks?

This study assesses how banking sector integration and especially cross-border lending affect macroeconomic stability. I use a two-country general equilibrium model with heterogeneous banks that are hit by idiosyncratic shocks. According to the concept of granularity, idiosyncratic shocks to large firms (or: banks) do not have to cancel out under a skewed distribution of firm sizes. Given the...

Who Has to Leave and Why? Displacement in Kyrgyzstan: Evidence from a New Micro-Level Dataset

Incidences of mass displacement constitute a major obstacle to economic and social prosperity in many developing countries. While significant progress in understanding the micro-level foundations of violence is being made, quantitative evidence on individual and group interactions in displacement environments is still relatively scarce. In this paper, we use unique household and individual survey...

Spite and Cognitive Skills in Preschoolers

Although spiteful preferences play a crucial role in the development of human large-scale cooperation, there is little evidence on spiteful behavior and its determinants in children. We investigate the relationship between children¿s cognitive skills and spiteful behavior in a sample of 214 preschoolers aged 5-6 and their mothers. Other-regarding behavior of both mothers and children is elicited...

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 newly introduced in Germany in 2008 on firms' capital structure, investment and profitability. The identification of the causal effects is based on the escape clauses within the regulation using a difference-in-difference approach. Our results suggest that firms strongly react to the new regulation in order to avoid the...

Technology-Skill Complementarity and International TFP Differences

What determines whether a country is better at using some technologies than others? A widely held view is that a country's ability to absorb and implement technologies is tied to its human capital. In this paper, we construct a novel specification of technology that incorporates this idea. Countries are comprised of a range of industries with heterogeneous productivities. In high human capital...

Employment Generation in Rural Africa: Mid-term Results from an Experimental Evaluation of the Youth Opportunities Program in Northern Uganda

Can cash transfers promote employment and reduce poverty in rural Africa? Will lower youth unemployment and poverty reduce the risk of social instability? We experimentally evaluate one of Uganda's largest development programs, which provided thousands of young people nearly unconditional, unsupervised cash transfers to pay for vocational training, tools, and business start-up costs. Mid-term...

Differential Taxation and Firms' Financial Leverage: Evidence from the Introduction of a Flat Tax on Interest Income

Tax competition for the mobile factor capital has led to a trend in many countries to levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. In this study, we analyze the effect of such differential taxation on the debt ratio of firms. We exploit a 2009 tax reform in Germany as a quasi-experiment, which introduced a flat final withholding...

The Effect of Health and Employment Risks on Precautionary Savings

This paper extends the idea of using ex-ante risk measures in a model of precautionary savings by explicitly simulating future net-income risks. The uncertainty measure takes into account the interdependency of labour market status and health. The model is estimated for prime age males using the German Socio-Economic Panel Study for years 2001-2007. The empirical analysis is conducted using a...

Business Cycles and Financial Intermediation in Emerging Economies

This paper explores the quantitative role of financial market frictions on capital flows and the business cycle in emerging markets. A financial sector in close analogy to Gertler and Karadi (2011) is embedded in an otherwise standard neoclassical model of a small open economy. An agency problem between international investors and domestic banks gives rise to an endogenously determined leverage...

Evidence of Market Power in the Atlantic Steam Coal Market Using Oligopoly Models with a Competitive Fringe

The representation of market power in numerical partial equilibrium models is often derived using the concept of conjectural variations. We provide a better understanding of this concept from the theoretical basis to its implementation in numerical models. We use an analytical duopoly model in different settings to show that the best response of a player can be in conflict with the assumptions...

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.. -...

Occupational Sex Segregation and Management-Level Wages in Germany: What Role Does Firm Size Play?

The paper analyzes the gender pay gap in private-sector management positions based on German panel data and using fixed-effects models. It deals with the effect of occupational sex segregation on wages, and the extent to which wage penalties for managers in predominantly female occupations are moderated by firm size. Drawing on economic and organizational approaches and the devaluation of women's...

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 earnings 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...

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...