Discussion Papers

About the Discussion Papers

The researchers at DIW Berlin usually publish their research results in scientific journals. However, this process can take many months, depending on the circumstances. To help bridge this gap, DIW Berlin began publishing Discussion Papers in 1989. The Discussion Papers offer a preview of the latest, not-yet-published research results, and allow current research to make its way into current debate more quickly.

Notes for authors

For publication in the series of DIW discussion papers the following may be submitted: Papers by DIW employees, DIW research professors and directors, DIW research affiliates and guest scientists who have spent at least one week at DIW Berlin and thank DIW Berlin in a footnote.    
Papers submitted will be sent in electronic form to the head of the relevant department at DIW Berlin. It is checked by an internal referee procedure whether or not the paper is likely to be published in a refereed journal. A decision on publication will then be made on the basis of a referee report. Should a paper have already been accepted for a publication by a refereed SSCI magazine or have received an invitation to a re-submission in a first-class journal, it will appear immediately without a referee procedure.

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2126 results, from 1
  • Diskussionspapiere 2123 / 2025

    Basic Income and Labor Supply: Evidence from an RCT in Germany

    How does basic income (a regular, unconditional, guaranteed cash transfer) impact labor supply? We show that in search models of the labor market with income effects, this impact is theoretically ambiguous: Employment and job durations might increase or decrease, match surplus might be shifted to workers or employers, and worker surplus might be reallocated between wages and job amenities. We thus ...

    2025| Sarah Bernhard, Sandra Bohmann, Susann Fiedler, Maximilian Kasy, Jürgen Schupp, Frederik Schwerter
  • Diskussionspapiere 2122 / 2025

    Travel Patterns after the Deutschlandticket: A Combined Tracking and Survey Approach

    The Deutschlandticket, introduced in May 2023, offers unlimited travel on all regional public transport in Germany for 49€ per month. This paper provides an overview of how the intro-duction of the ticket influenced travel behaviour and mode choice based on the GIM Traces panel, a nationwide representative dataset combining GPS tracking data and survey re-sponses. The data, consisting of almost 4 million ...

    2025| Dennis Gaus, Heike Link
  • Diskussionspapiere 2121 / 2025

    Trade Effects of Direct and Indirect Carbon Pricing Policies

    This study examines how policies affecting the cost of using fossil fuels in production influence comparative advantage in the industrial sector. Firstly, we use a fixed-effects gravity model to estimate the export capabilities that determine comparative advantage. Subsequently, using data on direct (carbon taxes, ETS permit prices) and indirect (fossil fuel excise taxes and subsidies) carbon pricing ...

    2025| Antonia Kurz, Stela Rubínová
  • Diskussionspapiere 2120 / 2025

    When Credit Turns Political: Evidence from the Spanish Financial Crisis

    This paper provides causal evidence on the effect of credit crunches on political polarisation. Combining data on bank-firm connections and electoral outcomes at the city-level during the 2008-2014 Spanish financial crisis, I construct an instrument for unemployment based on the city-level exposure to (foreign) weak banks. I find that a 10% increase in (instrumented) local unemployment rates leads ...

    2025| Pia Hüttl
  • Diskussionspapiere 2119 / 2025

    Prioritize to Decarbonize: Thermal Retrofits, Carbon Prices, and Energy Inequality

    The energy crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exposed the heightened vulnerability of low-income households to rising heating costs, particularly those in energy inefficient buildings. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this study examines the distributional impact of heating costs across income deciles and evaluates the effectiveness of policy interventions. We find ...

    2025| Sophie M. Behr, Merve Kucuk, Maximilian Longmuir, Karsten Neuhoff
  • Diskussionspapiere 2118 / 2025

    Contracts in Crisis: The War in Ukraine and Long-Term Contracts in Energy Markets

    We examine the impact of the war in Ukraine on long-term contracts in energy markets. We find that traded contract volumes fall by 65 percent in the first months of the war. A collapse in bilateral trading contributes most to this decline. To protect themselves from price shocks, firms increasingly turned to long-term contracts already before the war. In sum, our results show that the market continued ...

    2025| Mats Kröger, Karsten Neuhoff, Sebastian Schwenen
  • Diskussionspapiere 2117 / 2025

    Declining Effective Tax Rates of Multinationals: The Hidden Role of Tax Base Reforms

    This paper documents the rise of corporate tax-base narrowing measures in the EU using a novel dataset covering both tax rate and tax base reforms implemented between 2014 and 2022. Our findings indicate a shift away from the ’cut rate – broaden base’ approach, as governments increasingly align corporate taxation with industrial policy objectives. We show that EU tax competition exerts downward pressure ...

    2025| Jules Ducept, Sarah Godar
  • Diskussionspapiere 2116 / 2025

    The Impact of Financial Support to Firms during Crises: The Case of Covid Aid in the EU

    The Covid-19 pandemic caused a global economic crisis, leading governments to provide substantial State Aid to support firms. This paper examines the effectiveness of Covid-related financial support in Spain and Italy, focusing on its impact on firm recovery. Using a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach combined with propensity score weighting, it compares outcomes of similar firms receiving aid ...

    2025| Giulia Canzian, Elena Crivellaro, Tomaso Duso, Antonella Rita Ferrara, Alessandro Sasso, Stefano Verzillo
  • Diskussionspapiere 2115 / 2025

    Environmentally-Responsible Households: Irresponsible Corporate Lobbying

    How do firms respond to greener household preferences? We construct a novel index of environmental willingness to act on the state-quarter level based on Google Trends search data. Relating the index to firm-level information on the U.S. auto- motive sector from 2006 to 2019, we find ambiguous results. On average, firms innovate more in electric, hydrogen, and hybrid (clean) technologies and reduce ...

    2025| Olimpia Cutinelli-Rendina, Sonja Dobkowitz, Antoine Mayerowitz
  • Diskussionspapiere 2114 / 2025

    Industry Transition to Climate Neutrality: Comparing Policy Approaches in Times of Geopolitical Fragmentation

    European climate policy was traditionally pursued in the expectation of global policy convergence, ensuring equal opportunities for domestic and foreign firms in achieving climate neutrality. However, increasing geopolitical fragmentation has disrupted this expectation. Across the globe, national strategies increasingly favor economic policies that benefit domestic industries and coercive economic ...

    2025| Till Köveker, Fernanda Ballesteros, Franziska Klaucke, Antonia Kurz, Karsten Neuhoff, Paula Niemöller, Sangeeth Selvaraju
  • Diskussionspapiere 2113 / 2025

    The Impact of Governmental Regulations on Housing Market: Findings of a Meta-Study of Empirical Literature

    Housing markets are affected by a large variety of factors. Among them, governmental regulations play an important role. Besides desired effects, all these policies exert a number of side effects, some of which can even offset the desired effects. In addition, different policies can cancel out each other. Therefore, it is important to be aware of the effects of individual policies and the composite ...

    2025| Konstantin A. Kholodilin
  • Diskussionspapiere 2112 / 2025

    Understanding Energy Savings in a Crisis: The Role of Prices and Non-monetary Factors

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was accompanied by a significant reduction of its gas supply to Europe, causing sharp energy price surges and prompting governments to respond with public appeals and programs aimed at reducing consumption. This paper investigates the effects of price increases and non-monetary factors, such as public appeals and saving programs, on residential energy savings during ...

    2025| Sophie M. Behr, Till Köveker, Merve Kücük
  • Diskussionspapiere 2111 / 2025

    US Tariffs in a Model with Trade and FDI

    The new US administration has a clear agenda of reducing imports to the US and attract FDI by reducing tariffs and using the proceeds for supporting investment in the US. This paper uses a dynamic two country US vs RoW model where monopolistically competitive firms make export and FDI decisions. We study how this additional FDI channel affects the impact of import tariffs on the US and RoW economy. ...

    2025| Kaan Celebi, Werner Roeger
  • Diskussionspapiere 2110 / 2025

    Time-Varying Shock Transmission in Non-Gaussian Structural Vector Autoregressions

    This paper analyzes possibly time-varying shock transmission in structural vector autoregressive (VAR) models when the reduced-form VAR coefficients are time-invariant and the shocks are identified through non-Gaussianity. To check for possible time-variation in the impulse responses, we propose Wald tests for two situations: (1) homoskedastic and (2) heteroskedastic structural shocks. For the latter ...

    2025| Helmut Lütkepohl, Till Strohsal
  • Diskussionspapiere 2109 / 2025

    Quantifying the Fiscal Channel of Monetary Policy

    In macroeconomic models featuring borrowing-constrained agents, the effects of monetary policy depend on the fiscal reaction to interest rate changes. This paper presents new evidence on the dynamic causal effects of U.S. monetary policy shocks on fiscal instruments and estimates a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model with fiscal feedback rules to match the empirical results. I find that U.S. fiscal ...

    2025| Frederik Kurcz
  • Diskussionspapiere 2108 / 2025

    Comparing External and Internal Instruments for Vector Autoregressions

    In conventional proxy VAR analysis, the shocks of interest are identified by external instruments. This is typically accomplished by considering the covariance of the instruments and the reduced-form residuals. Alternatively, the instruments may be internalized by augmenting the VAR process by the instruments or proxies. These alternative identification methods are compared and it is shown that the ...

    2025| Martin Bruns, Helmut Lütkepohl
  • Diskussionspapiere 2107 / 2025

    Construction of a Narrative Instrument for Government Investment

    The article documents the construction of a narrative instrument for government investment, used in the paper ‘An Estimation and Decomposition of the Government Investment Multiplier’.

    2025| Marius Clemens, Claus Michelsen, Malte Rieth
  • Diskussionspapiere 2106 / 2025

    An Estimation and Decomposition of the Government Investment Multiplier

    We construct a narrative instrument for government investment from official records in Germany. Using structural vector autoregressions, we document a significant crowding-in of private investment and an output multiplier of roughly 2. Then, we match a New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model to the empirical responses, and we decompose the multiplier into three channels. Public investment ...

    2025| Marius Clemens, Claus Michelsen, Malte Rieth
  • Diskussionspapiere 2105 / 2024

    Wealth and Its Distribution in Germany, 1895-2021

    German history over the past 125 years has been turbulent. Marked by two world wars, revolutions and major regime changes, as well as a hyperinflation and three currency reforms, expropriations and territorial divisions, it comprises extreme shocks to study the role of historical events, taxation, asset price changes, portfolio heterogeneity in affecting the wealth distribution in the long run. Combining ...

    2024| Thilo N. H. Albers, Charlotte Bartels, Moritz Schularick
  • Diskussionspapiere 2104 / 2024

    The Impact of Student Aid Eligibility on Higher Education Applications

    This study examines how student aid eligibility influences application decisions to higher education using administrative data from France. We study the impact of a change in income thresholds for aid eligibility. We find that aid eligibility did not have a uniform effect on students’ applications but varied by gender and academic performance. Highperforming male students shifted their First-Ranked ...

    2024| Camille Remigereau, Clara Schäper
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