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DIW Discussion Papers 1675 / 2017
The relevance of spatial effects in the wage curve can be rationalized by the model of monopsonistic competition in regional labour markets. However, distortions in extracting the regional unemployment effects arise in standard regional (i.e. NUTS) classifications as they fail to adequately capture spatial processes. In addition, the nonstationarity of wages and unemployment is often ignored. Both ...
2017| Reinhold Kosfeld, Christian Dreger
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DIW Discussion Papers 1674 / 2017
We investigate the impact of competition policy enforcement on the functioning of European energy markets, and how sectoral regulation influences these outcomes. For this purpose, we compile a new dataset on the European Commission’s (EC) and EU member states’ competition policy decisions, and combine it with firm- and sector-level data. We find that EC merger policy has a positive and robust impact ...
2017| Tomaso Duso, Jo Seldeslachts, Florian Szücs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1673 / 2017
We investigate how personal income taxes affect the portfolio share of personal wealth that entrepreneurs invest in their own business. In a reformulation of the standard portfolio choice model that allows for underreporting of private business income to tax authorities, we show that a fall in the tax rate may increase investment in risky entrepreneurial business equity at the intensive margin, but ...
2017| Frank M. Fossen, Ray Rees, Davud Rostam-Afschar, Viktor Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1672 / 2017
The performance of information criteria and tests for residual heteroskedasticity for choosing between different models for time-varying volatility in the context of structural vector autoregressive analysis is investigated. Although it can be difficult to find the true volatility model with the selection criteria, using them is recommended because they can reduce the mean squared error of impulse ...
2017| Helmut Lütkepohl, Thore Schlaak
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DIW Discussion Papers 1671 / 2017
We investigate how worries in Germany change across time and age, drawing on both closed-ended questions (which typically list a number of worry items) and open-ended questions answered in text format. We find that relevant world events influence worries. For example, worries about peace peaked in 2003, the year of the Iraq War, with a considerable number of respondents also referring to the Iraq war ...
2017| Julia M. Rohrer, Martin Bruemmer, Jürgen Schupp, Gert G. Wagner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1670 / 2017
This paper investigates the degree of persistence of market fear. Specifically, two different long-memory approaches (R/S analysis with the Hurst exponent method and fractional integration) are used to analyse persistence of the VIX index over the sample period 2004-2016, as well as some sub-periods (pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis). The findings indicate that its properties change over time: in ...
2017| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana, Alex Plastun
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DIW Discussion Papers 1669 / 2017
This paper examines global and regional stock market integration in Asia at both the aggregate and disaggregate (industry) level by applying the Phillips-Sul (2007) tests for panel and club convergence. The main findings can be summarised as follows. In the pre-2008 crisis period, no integration/convergence of any kind is found. By contrast, in the post-crisis period, the Asian stock markets appear ...
2017| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Kefei You
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DIW Discussion Papers 1668 / 2017
This paper employs a price-based measure of integration, namely stock return differentials between ten emerging Asian economies and the US (as an indicator of global integration), as well as Japan and the Asian region (as two alternative indicators of regional integration), to test for mean reversion and draw inference on financial integration. It makes a three-fold contribution: it uses not only aggregate ...
2017| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana, Kefei You
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DIW Discussion Papers 1667 / 2017
This paper revisits the Fisher hypothesis by estimating fractional integration and cointegration models that are more general than the standard ones based on the classical I(0)/I(1) dichotomy. Two sets of results are obtained under the alternative assumptions of white noise and Bloomfield (1973) autocorrelated errors respectively. The univariate analysis suggests than the differencing parameter is ...
2017| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana
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DIW Discussion Papers 1666 / 2017
In an urban economy, the distribution of people and real estate prices depends on the location of the central business district of a city. As distance from the city center increases, both prices and population density diminish, for travel costs increase in terms of time and money. As manufacturing gradually leaves the cities, the importance of consumer amenities as attractors of population to the urban ...
2017| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Irina Krylova, Darya Kryutchenko
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DIW Discussion Papers 1665 / 2017
In this paper, we examine the predictive ability of automatic and expert-rated media sentiment indicators for German inflation. We find that sentiment indicators are competitive in providing inflation forecasts against a large set of common macroeconomic and financial predictors. Sophisticated linguistic sentiment algorithms and business cycle news rated by experts perform best and are superior to ...
2017| Benjamin Beckers, Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Dirk Ulbricht
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DIW Discussion Papers 1664 / 2017
We present an ex-post analysis of the effects of GDF’s acquisition of Suez in 2006 created one of the world’s largest energy companies. We perform an econometric analysis, based on Difference-in-Difference techniques on the market for trading on the Zeebrugge gas hub in Belgium. Removing barriers to entry and facilitating access to the hub through ownership unbundling were an important part of the ...
2017| Elena Argentesi, Albert Banal-Estanol, Jo Seldeslachts, Meagan Andrews
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DIW Discussion Papers 1663 / 2017
Mexico plans to implement a national program to support the adoption of distributed photo-voltaic generation (DPVG) among qualified households. The main objectives of such a program would be to reduce the burden of the substantial federal energy subsidy and increase the share of renewable energy sources used to generate electricity. In this paper we assess the current conditions under which the Mexican ...
2017| Pedro I. Hancevic, Hector M. Nunez, Juan Rosellón
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DIW Discussion Papers 1662 / 2017
This paper addresses the behavioral puzzle of women’s preference for competition when competitors are also women. Using a framed field experiment with 883 non-standard subjects, we show that none of the determinants of competitive behavior in general, including ability, self-confidence and risk aversion, provide a satisfying explanation for women’s substantive gender-related selection into competition. ...
2017| Norma Burow, Miriam Beblo, Denis Beninger, Melanie Schröder
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DIW Discussion Papers 1661 / 2017
Euro area countries and Japan are confronted with similar challenges. Potential output is on a falling trend in the euro area, and the decrease started well before the financial crisis. In Japan, low output growth is a striking feature since many years, despite the unconventional monetary policy stance and massive fiscal stimulus programs provided by the government. According to a growth accounting ...
2017| Christian Dreger
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DIW Discussion Papers 1660 / 2017
Faster urbanization plays a key role in the Chinese economic transformation. However, at the Lewis turning point, the hukou institution constitutes a serious risk to the process, as it restricts the access of migrants to public services offered by cities. To attract further migration, firms started to accept a premium on top of the wage. Thus, the social discrimination introduced by the hukou system ...
2017| Christian Dreger, Yanqun Zhang
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DIW Discussion Papers 1659 / 2017
Kazakhstan envisions a transition towards a green economy in the next decades which poses an immense challenge as the country heavily depends on (hydro-)carbon resources, for both its economy and its energy system. In this context, there is a lack of comprehensive and transparent planning tools to assess possible sustainable development pathways in regard to their technical, economic, and environmental ...
2017| Makpal Assembayeva, Jonas Egerer, Roman Mendelevitch, Nurkhat Zhakiyev
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DIW Discussion Papers 1658 / 2017
Changing employment conditions lead to new chances, but also new risks for employees. In the literature, increasing permeability between occupational and private life is discussed as one special outcome of this development that employees must face, especially those in highly qualified positions. Drawing on existing research, we investigate in how far women and men in those positions differ in their ...
2017| Anne Busch-Heizmann, Elke Holst
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DIW Discussion Papers 1657 / 2017
Social norms and attitudes towards gender roles have been shown to have a large effect on economic outcomes of men and women. Many countries have introduced policies that aim at changing gender stereotypes, for example fathers’ quota in parental leave schemes. In this paper, we analyze whether the introduction of the fathers’ quota in Germany in 2007, that caused a sharp increase in the take-up of ...
2017| Ulrike Unterhofer, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1656 / 2017
Abstract This paper expands the discussion about future balancing reserve provision to the long-term perspective of 2050. Most pathways for a transformation towards a decarbonized electricity sector rely on very high shares of fluctuating renewables. This can be a challenge for the provision of balancing reserves, although their influence on the balancing cost is unclear. Apart from the transformation ...
2017| Casimir Lorenz