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DIW Discussion Papers 1615 / 2016
This research studies the stylized fact of a “gender gap” in that women tend to have lower financial literacy than men. Our data which samples middle-class people from Bangkok does not show a gender gap. This result is not explained by men’s low financial literacy, nor by women’s high income and good education. Rather, it seems influenced by country characteristics on general gender equality and finance-related ...
2016| Antonia Grohmann, Olaf Hübler, Roy Kouwenberg, Lukas Menkhoff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1614 / 2016
We analyze the pass-through of cost changes to retail tariffs in the German electricity market over the 2007 to 2014 period. We find an average pass-through rate of around 60%, which significantly varies with demand factors: while the pass-through rate to baseline tariffs, where firms have higher market power, is only 50%, it increases to 70% in the competitive segment of the market. Although the pass-through ...
2016| Tomaso Duso, Florian Szücs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1613 / 2016
We examine the consequences of compressing secondary schooling on students’ university enrollment. An unusual education reform in Germany reduced the length of academic high school while simultaneously increasing the instruction hours in the remaining years. Accordingly, students receive the same amount of schooling but over a shorter period of time, constituting an efficiency gain from an individual’s ...
2016| Jan Marcus, Vaishali Zambre
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DIW Discussion Papers 1612 / 2016
As panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) models can include several countries and variables in one system, they are well suited for global spillover analyses. However, PVARs require restrictions to ensure the feasibility of the estimation. The present paper uses a selection prior for a data-based restriction search. It introduces the stochastic search variable selection for PVAR models (SSVSP) as an alternative ...
2016| Annika Schnücker
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DIW Discussion Papers 1611 / 2016
This study provides empirical evidence that the costs of austerity crucially depend on the level of private indebtedness. In particular, fiscal consolidations lead to severe contractions when implemented in high private debt states. Contrary, fiscal consolidations have no significant effect on economic activity when private debt is low. These results are robust to alternative definitions of private ...
2016| Mathias Klein
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DIW Discussion Papers 1610 / 2016
World War I led to radical changes in the government policy of participating countries. The enormous demographic and economic disturbances caused by the war forced the governments of all the belligerent nations to drastically restrict the market freedom. In particular, the state began actively intervening in the housing market. Ukraine as a part of the former Russian Empire, for the first time in its ...
2016| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Tymofiy Gerasymov
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DIW Discussion Papers 1609 / 2016
The study aims to assess the distributional effects of taxing financial transactions including a focus on gender. It specifically investigates the impact of the low interest rate environment on tax revenues and distribution. The first part of the study is explorative, aiming to develop a concept for the assessment. This is because the role of low or even negative interest rates is not yet specifically ...
2016| Dorothea Schäfer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1608 / 2016
We compare seven established risk elicitation methods and investigate how they robustly explain eleven kinds of risky behavior with 760 individuals. Risk measures are positively correlated; however, their performance in explaining behavior is heterogeneous and, therefore, difficult to assess ex ante. To close this knowledge gap, greater diversification across risk measures is helpful. We do, indeed, ...
2016| Lukas Menkhoff, Sahra Sakha
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DIW Discussion Papers 1607 / 2016
This paper presents a novel theory of corruption in public procurement. It considers an agency setting of contract execution where the principal is a politician who can commit to a contract auditing policy. It is found that a benevolent politician, by choosing a sufficiently strict auditing, deters the contracting firm from padding costs, conversely, a selfish politician chooses a relatively lax auditing ...
2016| Olga Chiappinelli
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DIW Discussion Papers 1606 / 2016
The analysis of monetary developments have always been a cornerstone of the ECB’s monetaryanalysis and, thus, of its overall monetary policy strategy. In this respect, money demandmodels provide a framework for explaining monetary developments and assessing price stabilityover the medium term. It is a well-documented fact in the literature that, when interestrates are at the zero lower bound, the analysis ...
2016| Christian Dreger, Dieter Gerdesmeier, Barbara Roffia
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DIW Discussion Papers 1605 / 2016
This paper investigates whether central banks can attenuate excessive mispricing in stocks as suggested by the proponents of a "leaning against the wind" (LATW) monetary policy. For this, we decompose stock prices into a fundamental component, a risk premium, and a mispricing component. We argue that mispricing can arise for two reasons: (i) from false subjective expectations of investors about future ...
2016| Benjamin Beckers, Kerstin Bernoth
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DIW Discussion Papers 1604 / 2016
The achieved international consensus on the 1.5‐2°C target entails that most of current fossil fuel reserves must remain unburned. Currently, a majority of climate policies aiming at this goal are directed towards the demand side. In the absence of a global carbon regime these polices are prone to carbon leakage and other adverse effects. Supply‐side climate policies present an alternative and more ...
2016| Roman Mendelevitch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1603 / 2016
Since the millennium, the labor market participation of women and mothers is increasing across European countries. Several work/care policy measures underlie this evolution. At the same time, the labor market behavior of men and fathers, as well as their involvement in care work, is relatively unchanging, meaning that employed mothers are facing an increased burden with respect to gainful employment ...
2016| Kai-Uwe Müller, Michael Neumann, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1602 / 2016
This paper introduces changes in the level of ambiguity as a complementary source of time-varying risk aversion. We show in a consumption-based asset pricing model with simultaneously risky and ambiguous assets that a rise in the level of ambiguity raises investors' risk aversion. The effect is quantified in an application to European sovereign debt markets using a structural VAR to achieve identification ...
2016| Christoph Große Steffen, Maximilian Podstawski
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DIW Discussion Papers 1601 / 2016
Moving non-incremental innovations from the pilot scale to full commercial scale raises questions about the need and implementation of public support. Heuristics from the literature put policy makers in a dilemma between addressing a market failure and acknowledging a government failure: incentives for private investments in large scale demonstrations are weak (the valley of death) but the track record ...
2016| Gregory F. Nemet, Martina Kraus, Vera Zipperer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1600 / 2016
This paper analyzes to what extent parental leave decisions of mothers with young children depend on the decisions made by their coworkers. The identification of peer effects, which are defined as indirect effects of the behavior of a social reference group on individual outcomes, bears various challenges due to correlated characteristics within social groups and endogenous group membership. We overcome ...
2016| Clara Welteke, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1599 / 2016
We show that hosting the Olympic Games in 2012 had a positive impact on the life satisfaction and happiness of Londoners during the Games, compared to residents of Paris and Berlin. Notwithstanding issues of causal inference, the magnitude of the effects is equivalent to moving from the bottom to the fourth income decile. But they do not last very long: the effects are gone within a year. These conclusions ...
2016| Paul Dolan, Georgios Kavetsos, Christian Krekel, Dimitris Mavridis, Robert Metcalfe, Claudia Senik, Stefan Szymanski, Nicolas R. Ziebarth
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DIW Discussion Papers 1598 / 2016
China’s government is promoting the shift towards a consumption-based economy since a few years. The explicit goal to significantly raise the percentage of wages in the national household income is integral part of the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-15). The changes in the economic strategy are likely to affect the attractiveness of the country to foreign investors. In this paper, we raise the hypothesis ...
2016| Julian Donaubauer, Christian Dreger
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DIW Discussion Papers 1597 / 2016
Die Debatte um Arbeitszeiten und deren Regulierung wird in der deutschen Öffentlichkeiterneut geführt. Empirische Grundlage sind dabei häufig Studien auf Basis des Mikrozensusoder des Sozio-oekonomischen Panels (SOEP), die teilweise erhebliche Unterschiede in ihrenErgebnissen aufweisen (Rengers 2015, Holst/Wieber 2014). In dem vorliegenden Beitragwird den Ursachen für diese Unterschiede nachgegangen. ...
2016| Elke Holst, Julia Bringmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1596 / 2016
We study the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policy in the euro area using structural vector autoregressions, identified with an external instrument. The instrument is the common unexpected variation in euro area sovereign spreads for different maturities on policy announcement days. We first show that expansionary monetary surprises are effective at lowering public and private interest ...
2016| Michael Hachula, Michele Piffer, Malte Rieth