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DIW Discussion Papers 328 / 2003
The deterioration of the income and employment position of unskilled workers in the OECD since the 1980s is a well-documented fact. The debate about the causes of this development is dominated by two competing hypotheses, "North-South Trade" ("globalisation") and technological progress. Several empirical methodologies have been used to identify and quantify the importance of these two explanations: ...
2003| Michael Pflüger
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DIW Discussion Papers 327 / 2003
Despite the fact that Argentina has been suffering from recession for years the timing and severity of the recent currency crisis has surprised most observers. This paper analyzes whether the "early warning" or "signals" approach of Kaminsky (1998), Kaminsky/Lizondo/Reinhart (1998) and Kaminsky/Reinhart (1999) could have predicted the Argentinean currency crisis at an earlier point in time. Using a ...
2003| Patricia Alvarez-Plata, Mechthild Schrooten
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DIW Discussion Papers 326 / 2003
Wir diskutieren eine Reihe von Problemen der Rentenformel in der deutschen gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung (GRV). Wir zeigen, dass Bev¨olkerungsgruppen mit ¨uberdurchschnittlicher Lebenserwartung, insbesondere die besser Verdienenden, von den ¨ubrigen Versicherten subventioniert werden, da die Rentenformel Unterschiede in den gruppenspezifischen Lebenserwartungen nicht ber¨ucksichtigt. Außerdem f¨uhrt ...
2003| Friedrich Breyer, Mathias Kifmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 325 / 2003
This paper proposes a method for detecting income classes based on the change-point problem. There is an increasing demand for such a method in the literature. Computation of polarization indices requires a pre-grouping of the incomes. Similarly, indices of social exclusion and sometimes indices of income inequality require detection of thresholds. The estimation procedure is implemented using a bootstrap ...
2003| Conchita D'Ambrosio, Pietro Muliere, Piercesare Secchi
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DIW Discussion Papers 324 / 2003
One channel of business cycle shock transmission which gained attraction only recently is the confidence channel. The aim of the paper is to find out whether the confidence channel is actually working between the US and Germany. This is analysed using times series methods. In contrast to other studies the direct informational content of leading US indicators for German producer confidence and the significance ...
2003| Gustav Adolf Horn
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DIW Discussion Papers 323 / 2003
This paper follows two objectives: (i) It demonstrates the merits of the survey based approach to B2C eCommerce characteristics and company strategy, and (ii) it presents empirical evidence of the crucial importance of size and marketing investment in B2C eCommerce markets. It presents econometric estimates of the effects of company characteristics and company strategies on the performance of Viennese ...
2003| Stefan W. Schmitz, Paul Peter Sint
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DIW Discussion Papers 322 / 2003
Wir untersuchen den Einfluss von Branchenmerkmalen, Standort und Veränderungen im Zeitablauf auf Neugründungen von Betrieben mit einem Mehr- Ebenen-Ansatz. Die Analyse bezieht sich auf Westdeutschland im Zeitraum 1983- 1997. Innovationsaktivitäten und die Ausprägung des technologischen Regimes haben offenbar einen wesentlichen Einfluss auf Gründungsaktivitäten. Es bestehen erhebliche Unterschiede zwischen ...
2003| Michael Fritsch, Oliver Falck
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DIW Discussion Papers 321 / 2003
In this paper we estimate the labor supply function for married females in Estonia. Particularly, we are interested in determining the elasticities of the weekly supply of hours with respect to hourly wage rates and with respect to nonlabor income. We adopt the two-step estimation procedure. In the first step, we obtain parameter estimates of the self-selection corrected wage equation. At this stage, ...
2003| Boriss Siliverstovs, Dmitri Koulikov
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DIW Discussion Papers 320 / 2003
Is it politically feasible for governments to engineer endogenous growth? This paper illustrates two reasonable political decision mechanisms by which fiscal policy generates endogenous growth with a single accumulable factor, under a constant returns to scale production technology, and without production externalities. In the first mechanism, optimal policies are chosen by the government to maximize ...
2003| Chetan Ghate, Paul J. Zak
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DIW Discussion Papers 319 / 2002
Typically, laboratory experiments suffer from homogeneous subject pools and selfselection biases. The usefulness of survey data is limited by measurement error and by the questionability of their behavioral relevance. Here we present a method integrating interactive experiments and representative surveys thereby overcoming crucial weaknesses of both approaches. One of the major advantages of our approach ...
2002| Ernst Fehr, Urs Fischbacher, Bernhard von Rosenbladt, Jürgen Schupp, Gert G. Wagner
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DIW Discussion Papers 318 / 2002
The standardisation of the European systems of national accounts has progressed significantly in recent years. Some room for interpretation remains in regard to some accounting standards, the periodicity of the data, and the quality of the forecasts of budget deficits. Yet national accounts data of the eurozone countries are now a reliable basis for macroeconomic policy decisions. The stability and ...
2002| Tilman Brück, Andreas Cors, Klaus F. Zimmermann, Rudolf Zwiener
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DIW Discussion Papers 317 / 2002
We examine the impact of family income during childhood on the type of secondary school that German children attend, a good indicator of their lifetime socioeconomic attainment. By contrast with several US child outcome studies, we find that late-childhood income is a more important determinant of outcomes than early-childhood income, and income effects are not greater for poor households compared ...
2002| Stephen P. Jenkins, Christian Schluter
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DIW Discussion Papers 316 / 2002
In der Bundesrepublik Deutschland ist der Anteil der Personen, die sich im Zusammenhang mit der Einführung des Euro sorgen, hoch. Welche individuellen Eigenschaften das Vorliegen dieser Sorgen beeinflussen und wie diese sich im Zeitverlauf entwickeln, ist Gegenstand der Arbeit. In der psychologischen Angstforschung werden Sorgen als kognitive Komponente der Angst aufgefasst und sind somit als Einstellungen ...
2002| Bettina Isengard, Thorsten Schneider
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DIW Discussion Papers 315 / 2002
Using time-series cross-section data from the manufacturing sector of the 11West German 'Bundesl ¨ander' (Federal States) from 1970 to 1996, I examine the impact of public capital on private production. My econometric analysis explicitly takes into account four of the most frequent specification issues in the context of time-series cross-section data analysis: serial correlation, groupwise heteroscedasticity, ...
2002| Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 314 / 2002
Using a binary reference series based on the dating procedure of Artis, Kontolemis and Osborn (1997) different procedures for predicting turning points of the German business cycles were tested. Specifically, a probit model as proposed by Estrella and Mishkin (1997) as well as Markov-switching models were taken into consideration. The overall results indicate that the interest rate spread, the longterm ...
2002| Ulrich Fritsche, Vladimir Kuzin
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DIW Discussion Papers 313 / 2002
This paper analyses how international outsourcing has affected the relative demand for low skilled workers in Germany during the 1990s. In contrast to previous empirical work, the single elements of the input-output-matrix are used to disentangle international outsourcing and trade in final goods more accurately. The main finding is that during the 1990s international outsourcing had a significant ...
2002| Ingo Geishecker
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DIW Discussion Papers 312 / 2002
The German unemployment rate shows strong signs if non-stationarity over the course of the previous decades. This is in line with an insider-outsider model under full hysteresis. We applied a "theory-guided view" to the data using the structural VAR model as developed by Balmaseda, Dolado and López-Salido (2000) allowing for full hysteresis on the labour market. Our identification of the model implies ...
2002| Ulrich Fritsche, Camille Logeay
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DIW Discussion Papers 311 / 2002
We propose a framework for comparing the relationship between poverty and personal characteristics across countries (or across years), and use it to compare levels and patterns of relative poverty in the USA, Great Britain and Germany during the 1990s. The higher aggregate poverty rates in the USA and in Britain relative to Germany were mostly accounted for by higher poverty rates conditional on characteristics, ...
2002| Martin Biewen, Stephen P. Jenkins
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DIW Discussion Papers 310 / 2002
This paper generalizes the analysis of distributive conflict, politics, and growth developed by by Alesina-Rodrik (1994). We construct a heterogenous-agent framework in which both growth and the distribution of wealth are endogenous. Due to adjustments in the distribution of wealth, the composition of factor ownership across households equalizes in the long run. This implies that the optimal tax rate ...
2002| Satya Das, Chetan Ghate
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DIW Discussion Papers 309 / 2002
Using firm-level panel data from the German cost structure survey over the period 1992 to 2000, our empirical analysis shows that firms that increased material inputs relative to internal labor costs performed better in terms of gross operating surplus than other firms. However, firms that increased external services relative to internal labor costs, thus outsourcing service functions previously provided ...
2002| Bernd Görzig, Andreas Stephan