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DIW Discussion Papers 305 / 2002
We use data from the 1996 wave of the European Community Household Panel to present and compare the weekly number of hours mothers of children less than 16 years of age reported looking after children in nine European countries in 1996. In addition, we explore to what extent cross-country differences in socio-demographic characteristics and parents' employment status contribute to differences in maternal ...
2002| Jutta M. Joesch, C. Katharina Spiess
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DIW Discussion Papers 304 / 2002
This study argues that the political considerations were an important factor behind the crisis of the Brazilian real in January 1999. The divided coalition government and a president facing impending elections eschewed the correction of external misalignments and the fiscal austerity at a time when the markets were already excited by the 1997-98 East Asian and 1998 Russian financial crises. The hypothesis ...
2002| Omar F. Saqib
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DIW Discussion Papers 303 / 2002
The main objective of this paper is to understand the causes and symptoms of currency crises by reviewing its seminal literature, establishing its determinants, and outlining some of the relevant issues. The paper highlights the need to comprehend the process, which may lead to the inconsistency of the policies and render the situation favourable for a speculative attack. This involves, broadening ...
2002| Omar F. Saqib
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DIW Discussion Papers 302 / 2002
In the expected-utility theory of the monetary value of a statistical life, the so-called "dead-anyway" effect discovered by Pratt and Zeckhauser (1996) asserts that an individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for small reductions in mortality risk increases with the initial level of risk. Their reasoning is based on differences in the marginal utility of wealth between the two states of nature: life ...
2002| Friedrich Breyer, Stefan Felder
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DIW Discussion Papers 301 / 2002
Becker and Murphy (1988) constructed, in a well-known paper, a model of rational addiction in which people solve a dynamic optimization problem, choose an optimal timepath of drug consumption and thereby maximize lifetime utility. The model leads to the hypothesis that future consumption is a significant explanatory variable for present consumption. This paper briefly surveys the empirical studies ...
2002| Björn Frank
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DIW Discussion Papers 300 / 2002
A new method for constructing R&D capital stocks is proposed. Following Schumpeter, the development of R&D capital stocks is modelled as a process of creative destruction. Newly generated knowledge is assumed not only to add to the existing R&D capital stocks but also, by displacing old knowledge, to destroy part of that capital. This is in stark contrast to the perpetual inventory method, which postulates ...
2002| Jürgen Bitzer, Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 299 / 2002
Many validation studies deal with item-nonresponse and measurement error in earnings data. In this paper we explore motives of respondents for the failure to reveal earnings using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). GSOEP collects socio-economic information of private households in the Federal Republic of Germany. We explain the evolution of income-nonresponse in the GSOEP and demonstrate the ...
2002| Jörg-Peter Schräpler
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DIW Discussion Papers 298 / 2002
We consider a model of an information network where nodes can fail and transmission of information is costly. The formation of paths in such networks is modeled as the Nash equilibrium of an N player routing game. The task of obtaining this equilibrium is shown to be NP-Hard. We derive analytical results to identify conditions under which the equilibrium path is congruent to well known paths such as ...
2002| Rajgopal Kannan, Sudipta Sarangi, S. S. Iyengar
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DIW Discussion Papers 297 / 2002
This paper shows that stricter enforcement may increase tax evasion. Individuals vote on a linear income tax which is used to finance lump sum transfers. Stricter enforcement may make redistributive taxation more attractive to the decisive voter. The tax rate and transfer may rise which in turn may increase tax evasion. An example shows that this result can actually occur. The paper also discusses ...
2002| Rainald Borck
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DIW Discussion Papers 296 / 2002
Open source software (OSS) is a public good. A self-interested individual would consider providing such software, if the benefits he gained from having it justified the cost of programming. Nevertheless each agent is tempted to free ride and wait for others to develop the software instead. This problem is modelled as a war of attrition with complete information, job signaling, repeated contribution ...
2002| Jürgen Bitzer, Philipp J. H. Schröder
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DIW Discussion Papers 295 / 2002
This paper investigates the strategic value of the managerial incentive scheme in affecting firms' incentive in R&D investment and their product market activities. Firstly, we find that in Cournot-quantity competition, owners strategically assign a non-profitmaximization objective to their managers. Consequently, managers in a delegation game invest more in cost-reducing R&D, and have higher output, ...
2002| Zhentang Zhang
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DIW Discussion Papers 294 / 2002
Empirical work on price-cost margins often treats costs as exogenous. Allowing for endogenous costs when estimating price-cost margins is the topic of this paper. Methodologically, the endogenous cost model we propose leads to an additional equation that allows for the simultaneity in price setting in the product and the input market (labor in our case). In other words, the usual two-equation set-up ...
2002| Damien J. Neven, Lars-Hendrik Röller, Zhentang Zhang
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DIW Discussion Papers 293 / 2002
Why do people work unpaid overtime? We show that remarkable long-term labor earnings gains are associated with unpaid overtime in West Germany. A descriptive analysis suggests that over a 10-year period workers with unpaid overtime experience on average at least a 10 percentage points higher increase in real labor earnings than their co-workers. Applying panel data models this result generally holds. ...
2002| Markus Pannenberg
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DIW Discussion Papers 292 / 2002
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), this paper analyzes the dynamics of equivalent income in Germany in the eighties and nineties. Special emphasis is given to the separation of permanent and transitory components, the persistence of transitory shocks and their implications for the persistence of poverty and income inequality. The results suggest that 52 to 69 percent of income ...
2002| Martin Biewen
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DIW Discussion Papers 291 / 2002
In this paper R2-type measures of the explanatory power of multivariate linear and categorical probit models proposed in the literature are reviewed and their deficiencies are discussed. It is argued that a measure of the explanatory power should take into account the components which are explicitely modeled when a regression model is estimated while it should be indifferent to components not explicitely ...
2002| Martin Spieß, Gerhard Tutz
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DIW Discussion Papers 290 / 2002
In this paper, we take a multilevel perspective to investigate the role of child care in the transition to motherhood in Germany. We argue that in the European institutional context the availability of public day care and informal child care arrangements should be a central element of the local opportunity structure regarding the compatibility of childrearing and women's employment. Using data from ...
2002| Karsten Hank, Michaela Kreyenfeld
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DIW Discussion Papers 289 / 2002
In 1986 German federal parental leave and benefit policy was expanded in several ways, extending the potential duration of leave from six to ten months and paying child-rearing benefits to all new mothers regardless of their employment status before childbirth. The potential duration has increased four times since 1986 and stood at 18 months in 1991 and three years starting in 1992. This study uses ...
2002| Jan Ondrich, Katharina C. Spieß, Qing Yang
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DIW Discussion Papers 288 / 2002
We examine the determinants of low income transitions using first-order Markov models that control for initial conditions effects (those found to be poor in the base year may be a nonrandom sample) and for attrition (panel retention may also be non-random). Our econometric model is a form of endogeneous switching regression, and is fitted using simulated maximum likelihood methods. The estimates, derived ...
2002| Lorenzo Cappellari, Stephen P. Jenkins
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DIW Discussion Papers 287 / 2002
This paper analyses the consequences of the planned enlargement on the EU budget for the years 2007 and 2013. It concentrates on the EU's Common Agricultural Policy and Structural Policy and calculates the possible fiscal consequences of enlarging the EU for various policy scenarios. Enlarging the EU could be financed without overstepping the current upper limit for the EU budget, but it increases ...
2002| Christian Weise
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DIW Discussion Papers 286 / 2002
The growth of the German economy intrinsically depends on the development of German exports to the euro area, which is by far the biggest market for German products. The paper estimates a structural equation for the export demand from the EMU member countries, which is suitable for both simulations and short-term forecasts. However, the equation systematically underestimates the export demand for data ...
2002| Sabine Stephan