Thema Konjunktur

Wärmewende: Bundesregierung sollte Kommunen bei der Stilllegung der Erdgasnetze unterstützen

Die bestehenden Verteilnetze für Erdgas werden aufgrund der Dekarbonisierung der Wärmeversorgung in großen Teilen stillgelegt werden müssen. Für die Gasnetzbetreiber bestehen dazu weder regulatorische noch wirtschaftliche Anreize. Für die verbleibenden Kund*innen könnte eine verschleppte Stilllegung aber teuer werden. Dieser Wochenbericht untersucht, inwiefern die Kommunen durch die Rekommunalisierung ...

Gasnetzbetreiber brauchen Anreize und Hilfen zur Stilllegung der Netze: Interview

Der Kapitalismus ist nicht das Problem: Kommentar

DIW Berlin Economic Outlook: Global Economy Experiencing Robust Growth; Germany’s Recovery Is Delayed Further

The German economy will likely contract in the first quarter of 2024 due to still heightened inflation and weak demand, which was already weighing on German economic output in 2023. Inflation, which is falling in both Germany and the euro area overall, is expected to return close to the European Central Bank's two-percent target, suggesting that a turnaround in interest rates can be expected in early ...

Bad Luck or Bad Decisions? Macroeconomic Implications of Persistent Heterogeneity in Cognitive Skills and Overconfidence

Business cycle models often abstract from persistent household heterogeneity, despite its potentially significant implications for macroeconomic fluctuations and policy. We show empirically that the likelihood of being persistently financially constrained decreases with cognitive skills and increases with overconfidence thereon. Guided by this and other micro evidence, we add persistent heterogeneity ...

Determinants of Stock Market Participation

The low degree of stock market participation (SMP) is one of the big puzzles in finance. Numerous determinants have been proposed. We put these determinants into a structure that is derived from a standard static portfolio model. Then we discuss arguments put forward regarding specific SMP determinants and the empirical evidence that has been provided. The focus of our survey is on the identification ...

A HANK2 Model of Monetary Unions

How does a monetary union alter the impact of business cycle shocks at the household level? We develop a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model of two countries (HANK) and show in closed form that a monetary union shifts the adjustment to a shock horizontally across countries, within the brackets of the union-wide wealth distribution, rather than vertically, that is, across the brackets of the union-wide ...

Agglomeration Economies: Different Effects on TFP in High-tech and Low-tech Industries

We study the impact of agglomeration effects on firms’ total factor productivity (TFP) for industry groups defined by technology intensity. This allows for non-uniform effects on firms depending on their technological level. We find that urban economies have the largest impact on firm productivity in high-technology industries, while they have no effectin low-technology industries. For firms in the ...

Persistent US Current Account Deficit: The Role of Foreign Direct Investment

This paper re-evaluates the US external deficit which has considerably widened over the 1990s. US safe asset provision to the rest of the world is the dominant explanation for the persistent nature of the US external deficit. We suggest that apart from the safe asset hypothesis, there is an important role for technology shocks originating in US multinational companies that have a strong foreign direct ...

Risk Preference and Entrepreneurial Investment at the Top of the Wealth Distribution

This study quantifies the distributional effects of the minimum wage introduced in Germany in 2015. Using detailed Socio-Economic Panel survey data, we assess changes in the hourly wages, working hours, and monthly wages of employees who were entitled to be paid the minimum wage. We employ a difference-in-differences analysis, exploiting regional variation in the “bite” of the minimum wage. At the ...