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DIW Discussion Papers 1815 / 2019
Although universal childcare has become an essential tool to support child development, few economic studies analyze its effects on non-cognitive skills and little is known about causal effects on these skills in the long run. In this paper we go beyond short run analyses and examine the long run effects of one additional year of universal childcare on students’ personality traits in adolescence. We ...
2019| Maximilian Bach, Josefine Koebe, Frauke H. Peter
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DIW Discussion Papers 1814 / 2019
Macroprudential policies for financial institutions have received increasing prominence since the global financial crisis. These policies are often aimed at the commercial banking sector, while a host of other non-bank financial institutions, or shadow banks, may not fall under their jurisdiction. We study the effects of tightening commercial bank regulation on the shadow banking sector. For this purpose, ...
2019| Stefan Gebauer, Falk Mazelis
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DIW Discussion Papers 1813 / 2019
In energy efficiency networks, groups of firms exchange experiences on energy conservation in regular meetings over several years. The companies implement energy efficiency measures in order to reach commonly agreed energy savings and CO2 reduction goals. Existing evaluations of such voluntary regional networks claim that participants improved energy efficiency at twice the speed of the industry average. ...
2019| Jan Stede
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DIW Discussion Papers 1812 / 2019
This paper analyzes the impact of urbanization on CO2 emissions within the STIRPAT framework over the period 1971 to 2014 for a panel of 76 countries clustered into income groups. Using dynamic panel estimations techniques, the empirical results robustly show an inverted N-shaped relationship between urbanization and CO2 emissions in the long-term associated with the ecological modernization theory ...
2019| Lars Sorge, Anne Neumann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1811 / 2019
This paper analyzes the nature of democratic development in a nation on the process of introducing nuclear power over the period 1960 - 2017 for an unbalanced panel of 171 countries. Given the involved political process of introducing nuclear power and its political importance, as well as the current tendency of about 30 countries to “go nuclear”, this question is both of historic and current interest. ...
2019| Lars Sorge, Anne Neumann, Christian von Hirschhausen, Ben Wealer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1810 / 2019
We examine the introduction of a gender quota law in Germany, mandating a minimum 30% of the underrepresented gender on the supervisory boards of a particular type of firms. We exploit the fact that Germany has a two-tier corporate system consisting of the affected supervisory boards and unaffected management boards within the same firm. We find a positive effect on the female share on supervisory ...
2019| Alexandra Fedorets, Anna Gibert, Norma Burow
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DIW Discussion Papers 1809 / 2019
This paper analyzes the impact of a reduction in women's labor supply through retirement on their informal care provision. Using SOEP data from the years 2001- 2016 the analysis addresses fundamental endogeneity problems by applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We exploit early retirement thresholds for women in the German pension system as instruments for their retirement decision. We ...
2019| Björn Fischer, Kai-Uwe Müller
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DIW Discussion Papers 1808 / 2019
We document day care enrolment gaps by family background for children under 3 in Germany. Research demonstrates that children of less-educated or foreign-born parents benefit most from day care, making it important to understand the causes of such enrolment gaps. Using a unique data set that records both actual and preferred day care usage, we demonstrate that differences in demand cannot fully explain ...
2019| Jonas Jessen, Sophia Schmitz, Sevrin Waights
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DIW Discussion Papers 1807 / 2019
In this paper, we analyse the effects of a unilateral change in an emissions tax in a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms. We find a positive effect of tighter environmental policy on average productivity in the reforming country through reallocation of labour towards exporting firms. Domestic aggregate emissions fall, due to both a scale and a technique effect, but we show that the ...
2019| Udo Kreickemeier, Philipp M. Richter
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DIW Discussion Papers 1806 / 2019
This study investigates the interrelation between the household leverage cycle, collateral constraints, and monetary policy. Using data on the U.S. economy, we find that a contractionary monetary policy shock leads to a large and significant fall in economic activity during periods of household deleveraging. In contrast, monetary policy shocks only have insignificant effects during a household leveraging ...
2019| Martin Harding, Mathias Klein
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DIW Discussion Papers 1805 / 2019
Does the federal minimum wage in Germany introduced in 2015 improve the income situation of low income households and reduce in-work poverty? Previous literature on its distributional impact was either focused on earnings and hourly wages (e.g. Caliendo et al., 2017), or is based on ex-ante simulations (e.g. Müller and Steiner, 2013). This paper provides systematic descriptive ex-post evidence on the ...
2019| Teresa Backhaus, Kai-Uwe Müller
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DIW Discussion Papers 1804 / 2019
With more than ten thousand casualties, the 2014 Ukrainian war between pro-Russian separatists and the government in the Donbass region, Ukraine's productive core, has taken a severe toll on the country. Using cross-country panel data over the period 1995-2017, this paper quantifies the short-term causal effects of the Donbass war on Ukraine's GDP. Results from the counterfactual estimation by the ...
2019| Julia Bluszcz, Marica Valente
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DIW Discussion Papers 1803 / 2019
Antibiotic resistance constitutes a major health threat. Predicting bacterial causes of infections is key to reducing antibiotic misuse, a leading cause of antibiotic resistance. We combine administrative and microbiological laboratory data from Denmark to train a machine learning algorithm predicting bacterial causes of urinary tract infections. Based on predictions, we develop policies to improve ...
2019| Michael A. Ribers, Hannes Ullrich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1802 / 2019
While several studies suggest that stress-related mental health problems among school children are related to specific elements of schooling, empirical evidence on this causal relationship is scarce. We examine a German schooling reform that increased weekly instruction time and study its effects on stress-related outpatient diagnoses from the universe of health claims data of the German Social Health ...
2019| Jan Marcus, Simon Reif, Amelie Wuppermann, Amélie Rouche
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DIW Discussion Papers 1801 / 2019
The loss of international competitiveness of domestic industries remains a key obstacle to the implementation of effective carbon prices in a world without harmonized climate policies. We analyze countries' non-cooperative choices of emissions taxes under imperfect competition and mobile polluting firms. In our general equilibrium setup with trade, wage effects prevent all firms from locating in the ...
2019| Philipp M. Richter, Marco Runkel, Robert C. Schmidt
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DIW Discussion Papers 1800 / 2019
I study the predictability of the EC’s merger decision procedure before and after the 2004 merger policy reform based on a dataset covering all affected markets of mergers with an official decision documented by DG Comp between 1990 and 2014. Using the highly flexible, non-parametric random forest algorithm to predict DG Comp’s assessment of competitive concerns in markets affected by a merger, I find ...
2019| Pauline Affeldt
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DIW Discussion Papers 1799 / 2019
We exploit the natural experiment of German reunification in 1990 to investigate if the institutional regimes of the formerly socialist (rather gender-equal) East Germany and the capitalist (rather gender-traditional) West Germany shaped different gender identity prescriptions of family breadwinning. We use data for three periods between 1984 and 2016 from the representative German Socio-Economic Panel ...
2019| Maximilian Sprengholz, Anna Wieber, Elke Holst
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DIW Discussion Papers 1798 / 2019
Offen ausgetragenen Lagerdebatten zwischen Ökonomen sind in Deutschland eher selten. Was hingegen öfters in Diskussionen oder in der Berichterstattung über Ökonomen mitschwingt, ist eine Zuordnung in weltanschauliche Lager, etwa nach Schemata wie arbeitgeber-arbeitnehmernah oder auch gelegentlich links-wirtschaftsliberal. Da diese Zuordnung für die nicht an der Spitze der öffentlichen Bekanntheit stehenden ...
2019| Wolfgang Schwarzbauer, Tobias Thomas, Gert G. Wagner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1797 / 2019
We study the evolution of the EC’s merger decision procedure over the first 25 years of European competition policy. Using a novel dataset constructed at the level of the relevant markets and containing all merger cases over the 1990-2014 period, we evaluate how consistently arguments related to structural market parameters were applied over time. Using non-parametric machine learning techniques, we ...
2019| Pauline Affeldt, Tomaso Duso, Florian Szücs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1796 / 2019
Structural VAR models are frequently identified using sign restrictions on contemporaneous impulse responses. We develop a methodology that can handle a set of prior distributions that is much larger than the one currently allowed for by traditional methods. We then develop an importance sampler that explores the posterior distribution just as conveniently as with traditional approaches. This makes ...
2019| Martin Bruns, Michele Piffer