Public Economics Department Events

For the design of pension reform it is crucial to disentangle the employment effects related to the substitution and the income effect. In this paper we provide causal evidence about the importance of the income effect which in general has been assumed to be small or non-existent. We exploit a pension reform in Germany that raised pension benefits related to children. For ...

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Since the start of the century, particularly in urban centres, housing markets worldwide have experienced stark price and rent increases. As a consequence urban agglomerations have experienced strong changes in their neighbourhood composition with originally poorer, central areas gentrifying quickly. Governments have reacted by raising the topic of affordable housing on the ...

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This paper estimates a structural dynamic discrete choice model on parental care provision, retirement and labor supply. We want to estimate the dynamic consequences of providing informal care or organizing formal care for care dependent parents. While there might be negative long term consequences on wages and retirement benefits, agents might respond to incentives in the long term care ...

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What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land traversing political, linguistic, geological, and religious borders in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally among children, while in others land was ruled to be indivisible. Using a geographic regression ...

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Workers in demanding jobs may be particularly negatively affected by an increasing statutory retirement age. We exploit a pension reform that raised the early retirement age of women from 60 to 63 years in Germany. Based on a large administrative social security data set we exploit the quasi-natural experiment using a regression-discontinuity approach. We find the same relative employment ...

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This study examines the relationship between air quality alerts and school absenteeism in New York City. Examining the effects of the alerts in school attendance is relevant because it helps us understand parents' avoidance behavior in situations of exacerbated exposure to air contaminants. Causality arises by exploiting the deterministic nature of the alerts with regression discontinuity ...

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Abstract:   Our research question is to what extent does the familiarity with the testing environment impact the relative performance of boys and girls in standardized testing. We use an RCT-design on the full population of students in Grade 6 and 10 across several subjects in the Region of Madrid (Spain). This standardized test was either "Externally" administered, meaning that teachers ...

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We combine unique data that include all practitioner health diagnoses based on the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) collected from all publicly insured individuals in Germany with a sizable cohort specific pension reform to study the causal effect of an increase in the retirement age on health. For the analysis, we use a cohort specific regression discontinuity design. The ...

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Abstract:  User generated content is increasingly substituting content created by professionals. Local news that is generated by citizen journalists could be a promising way of supporting the struggling newspaper industry by reducing costs for professional journalists. We study a network of 122 local Austrian newspapers operating a hybrid model of citizen and professional journalism. We first ...

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Summary:  This talk will provide a survey of several papers on the theory and practice of experimental design. I will compare different objectives (estimator precision, outcomes of participants, informing policy choice to maximize average outcomes, and informing policy choice to maximize utilitarian welfare), and their implications for experimental design. I will consider heuristic ...

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Unfortunately the event is canceled. As soon as a new date is fixed, it will be announced here on the website. BAMS is a joint seminar by the DIW Berlin, the Hertie School of Governance, the HU Berlin and the WZB.

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My master thesis compares the impact of different life-courses on the Gender Pension Gaps across East and West Germany, Czechia and Italy. Using retrospective data on the dimensions of work and family from SHARELIFE, I contrast two different approaches. The first applies sequence data analysis to identify work-family life course patterns across all four countries as a first step, and includes ...

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Abstract:   I derive an optimal benefit-based corporate tax rate formula as a function of the public input elasticity of profits and the (net of) tax elasticity of profits. I argue that the existence of the corporate income tax should be justified by the benefit-based view of taxation: firms should pay tax according to the benefits they receive from the use of the public input. I argue that ...

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BAMS is a joint seminar by the DIW Berlin, the Hertie School of Governance, the HU Berlin and the WZB.

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We estimate the effect of a sudden increase in the inflow of refugees on the native population’s mental health in Germany and Swiss. To identify the effect of the sudden influx of refugees to Germany and Swiss, we exploit the quasi-random allocation of the number of refugees to counties in Germany and Swiss. For Germany, we make use of the Socio-Economic Panel. For Swiss, we use individual ...

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A large literature documents effects of parental leave on mothers' labour market outcomes, yet we know very little about the effects on their  firms and co-workers. We use unique administrative data that covers the universe of employees subject to social security and firms in Germany to address this question. We first establish some novel stylised facts in parental leave-taking   ...

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BAMS is a joint seminar by the DIW Berlin, the Hertie School of Governance, the HU Berlin and the WZB.

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Abstract: Through social interaction in the workplace, coworkers are likely to learn from each other (knowledge spillover) and this may extend the returns to firm-provided training from trained workers onto untrained coworkers. Based on German matched-employer employee data covering the universe of employees we investigate whether unskilled workers derive long-term career benefits if they were ...

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The high prevalence of forced migration in recent years has induced a shift in attitudes towards immigrants and refugees and, in turn, increasing xenophobic violence. We address this topic and estimate the effect of xenophobic attacks against refugee shelters on refugees’ mental health. For this purpose, we combine two innovative data sets: administrative records on xenophobic crime by ...

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