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DIW Roundup 119 / 2018
The ECB announced in October 2018 that it would begin to cut back the amount of monthly asset purchases starting January 2018 while extending the duration of the purchases until at least September 2018. At it latest Governor’s Council meeting in January 2019 it decided to remain on this track despite a sharp appreciation of the euro in the meanwhile. These steps were just two on a longer and potentially ...
2018| Daniel Privitera, Malte Rieth
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DIW Roundup 117 / 2017
Global capital flows have strongly increased from the 1980s until the outbreak of the financial crisis. As a result of this development, Germany's foreign investment has risen to around 250 percent of gross domestic product while foreign investments in Germany have increased to about 200 percent of Germany’s gross domestic product. This positive difference between Germany’s assets and liabilities is ...
2017| Guido Baldi, Björn Bremer, Thore Schlaak
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DIW Roundup 116 / 2017
After the establishment of the Banking Union, the European Commission is working on measures to foster capital market deepening in Europe. Key goals for a European Capital Markets Union are to provide firms with alternative funding sources to bank credit and to make economies more resilient to local shocks through better international risk sharing. While open capital markets can improve portfolio diversification, ...
2017| Franziska Bremus, Ruth Stelten
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DIW Roundup 115 / 2017
Financial market indicators can provide valuable information for forecasting macroeconomic developments. In response to the global financial crisis of 2007/2008, the role of financial variables for forecasting has been revisited, and new empirical and theoretical forecasting methods able to explicitly incorporate financial market information have been developed. This roundup discusses characteristics ...
2017| Stefan Gebauer
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DIW Roundup 114 / 2017
Microenterprises account for a large fraction of employment in developing countries and they are likely to increase in importance in the future. In Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, around 8 million additional jobs need to be created annually in order to cope with the increasing number of new entrants into the labour market (The World Bank, 2013). As microenterprises typically only provide subsistence ...
2017| Helke Seitz
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DIW Roundup 113 / 2017
Mental health conditions are a leading cause of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) and health costs worldwide: They account for 199 million DALYs or 37 percent of healthy life years lost from non-communicable diseases. The sum of direct and indirect costs worldwide were estimated to amount to 2.5 trillion US dollars in 2010 and projected to increase to 6 trillion US dollars in 2030 (Bloom et al., ...
2017| Daniel Graeber
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DIW Roundup 111 / 2017
Since the 1990s, (onshore) wind power has become an important technology for electricity generation throughout the world. The economic rationale is the mitigation of negative externalities of conventional technologies, in particular emissions from fossil fuel combustion. However, wind power itself is not free of externalities. Wind turbines are alleged visual and noise impacts as well as threats to ...
2017| Alexander Zerrahn
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DIW Roundup 110 / 2017
In many advanced economies, there has been a declining trend in interest rates over the past thirty years. Since the financial crisis, interest rates have remained particularly low. Though a decrease in inflation explains part of the fall in nominal interest rates, there is also a clear downtrend in real interest rates. Against this backdrop, a debate has emerged over the factors that might have contributed ...
2017| Guido Baldi, Patrick Harms
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DIW Roundup 109 / 2017
The concept of the natural rate of interest (NRI) dates back to Wicksell (1898) and has since then been highly debated in the economic literature. In practice, estimates of the NRI can be employed as a versatile tool for macroeconomic analysis and are a core element within the popular neo-Wicksellian (or New-Keynesian) framework. The real rate gap, i.e. the difference between the actual interest rate ...
2017| Dmitry Chervyakov, Philipp König
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DIW Roundup 108 / 2017
The term natural (or neutral) real interest rate refers to the equilibrium value of the real interest rate. As this equilibrium is usually conceived as a situation where inflationary or deflationary pressures have abated, the natural real interest rate is a key concept for central banks seeking to stabilize the general price level or targeting the rate of inflation. The present roundup provides a brief ...
2017| Philipp König, Dmitry Chervyakov
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DIW Roundup 107 / 2017
Inflation targeting has become one of the most prominent monetary regimes around the globe. Proponents argue that it reduces the dynamic inconsistency problem of monetary policy and thereby stabilises prices, which in turn promotes growth. Opponents, on the other hand, say that by focusing on price stability inflation targeting neglects other important policy objectives, such as financial stability, ...
2017| Malte Rieth
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DIW Roundup 104 / 2016
While combating tax evasion ranks highly on the international policy agenda and journalists are covering leak after leak, the economics profession at large has somewhat neglected the subject until recently. In the last years, however, a combination of better international financial data and ingenious identification strategies in several pioneering studies has made the subject popular in empirical economics. ...
2016| Jakob Miethe, Helge Niesytka
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DIW Roundup 102 / 2016
Parental leave policies are a major policy tool used across OECD countries to support families before and after child birth. There are large differences across countries in the amount and the duration of benefit payments as well as leave entitlement periods. Despite these differences, the shared goal of parental leave policies is to reconcile family life and work, and support child development. While ...
2016| Mathias Huebener
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DIW Roundup 100 / 2016
It is heavily discussed whether trade liberalization is good or bad for the poor in a given (developing) country. The answer depends on a wide variety of factors, such as the type of trade barrier removed, the economic and institutional environment in the country, and the characteristics of the poor in that country (Winters 2002; Winters et al. 2004). In addition, the results can also be driven by ...
2016| Isabel Teichmann
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DIW Roundup 99 / 2016
The academic literature provides no clear answer to this question. In principle, the recent slowdown in reform activity and fiscal consolidation in the euro area may derive from several developments. Potential reasons involve the end of the economic recession, the provision of financial assistance to crisis countries, and improved financing conditions for governments as a result of unconventional monetary ...
2016| Malte Rieth, Lisa Gehrt
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DIW Roundup 98 / 2016
The increase of the use of atomic power in some emerging economies, in particular South Korea and China, has revitalized a discussion regarding the availability of uranium resources. Despite the fact that global uranium resources are more than sufficient to supply reactor-related demand for the rest of the century, some voices in the nuclear community expect a supply shortage for the upcoming decades, ...
2016| Roman Mendelevitch, Thanh Thien Dang
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DIW Roundup 96 / 2016
An increased flexibility of the electricity demand side through demand response (DR) is an opportunity to support the integration of renewable energies. By optimising the use of the generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure, DR reduces the need for costly investments and contributes to system security. There is a significant technical DR potential for load reduction from industrial production ...
2016| Jan Stede
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DIW Roundup 95 / 2016
One of the central results in international economics is that an economy cannot have at the same time independent monetary policy, free capital flows, and a fixed exchange rate. Over the last few years, however, this so-called Mundell-Flemming ‘trilemma’ has increasingly been challenged. It is argued that given the rising importance and synchronization of capital and credit flows across countries and ...
2016| Pablo Anaya, Michael Hachula
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DIW Roundup 93 / 2016
A key challenge for economic policy today is to make the financial system more resilient. The literature finds that high indebtedness (or: leverage), both in the financial and in the real sectors, is a danger to macroeconomic stability and growth. Moreover, the design of the corporate tax system is an important determinant of leverage: in many countries interest paid on debt is tax-deductible while ...
2016| Franziska Bremus, Jeremias Huber
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DIW Roundup 92 / 2016
This Roundup discusses the literature on the effects of uncertainty on economic activity. Uncertainty will be generally referred to as the agents’ inability to form clear expectations about the future path of relevant economic variables. After motivating the analysis from a policy perspective, the Roundup outlines the key channels through which uncertainty exerts an impact on the economy. It then discusses ...
2016| Michele Piffer