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DIW Discussion Papers 1535 / 2015
Crowding on public transport (PT) is a major issue for commuters around the world. Nevertheless, economists have rarely investigated the causes of crowding discomfort. Furthermore, most evidence on the costs of PT crowding is based on contingent valuation studies. First, this paper assesses discomfort with PT crowding over different density levels, trip durations and across different individuals using ...
2015| Luke Haywood, Martin Koning, Guillaume Monchambert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1534 / 2015
This paper analyzes the short- and long-term impact of extreme weather events on educational outcomes in Mongolia. Our focus is on two extremely severe winters that caused mass livestock mortality. We use household panel data with comprehensive retrospective information on households’ historic experience with weather shocks. Exposure to the weather shock significantly reduces the likelihood of being ...
2015| Valeria Groppo, Kati Krähnert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1533 / 2015
Open access means that research outputs, such as articles and data, are free of restrictions on access and free of restrictions on use. In the light of recent market developments in academic publishing, we argue in this essay that the discourse about open access must include a discussion about research infrastructure and innovation in academic publishing.
2015| Benedikt Fecher, Gert G. Wagner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1532 / 2015
The study focuses on the question of whether productivity estimates are biased due to the emergence of a new input that is usually omitted: temporary agency worker (TAW). The study analyzes labor productivity and TFP by means of a structural approach using a representative dataset of German manufacturing firms. The empirical results show, once TAW is taken into account, that: i) labor productivity ...
2015| Alexander Schiersch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1531 / 2015
This paper, which is one of the first to estimate productivity in retail electricity for a European country after liberalisation, analyses the effect of ownership and governance structure by using a unique dataset of German electricity retailers from 2003 to 2012. An innovative service production function for the retail sector is derived with labour and external services as the main inputs. A structural ...
2015| Caroline Stiel, Astrid Cullmann, Maria Nieswand
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DIW Discussion Papers 1530 / 2015
The paper aims at measuring the rental housing market regulations in Germany between 1913 and 2015. Four classes of housing policy are considered: Rent controls, tenant protection, rationing of housing, and fostering of social housing. Based on a thorough analysis of federal and regional legislation, for each class, an index is constructed, increasing in degree of regulation. The average of class-specific ...
2015| Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1529 / 2015
The interconnection among different choices by the same decision-maker is fairly well established in the literature. Along this line, this paper aims to identify how preferences for electromobility are affected by mode choices for regular trips. With this purpose in mind, a framework based on person- and alternative-specific error components (covariances) is proposed. The method aims to include individual-specific ...
2015| Francisco J. Bahamonde-Birke
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DIW Discussion Papers 1528 / 2015
This paper addresses the continuity of attitudinal and perceptual indicators in hybrid discrete choice models and the main objective of this work is to compare the consequences of treating the indicators as continuous or ordinal outcomes, given different assumptions about the way in which these are stated. Based on tradition and for computational reasons, such indicators are predominantly treated as ...
2015| Francisco J. Bahamonde-Birke, Juan de Dios Ortúzar
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DIW Discussion Papers 1527 / 2015
Although hybrid choice models are fairly popular nowadays, the way in which different types of latent variables are considered into the utility function has not been extensively analysed. Latent variables accounting for attitudes resemble socioeconomic characteristics and, therefore, systematic taste variations and categorizations of the latent variables should be considered. Nevertheless, categorizing ...
2015| Francisco J. Bahamonde-Birke, Juan de Dios Ortúzar
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DIW Discussion Papers 1526 / 2015
While productivity growth in electricity generation is associated with multiple positive effects from an economic and environmental perspective, measuring it is challenging. This paper proposes a framework to estimate and decompose productivity growth for a sector characterized by multiple technologies. Using a metafrontier Malmquist decomposition and frontier estimation based on stochastic non-smooth ...
2015| Stefan Seifert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1525 / 2015
This paper investigates the impact of peer observation on the consumption decisions of rural households in Thailand using a lab-in-the-field experiment. We find that those groups that observe each other show lower within group standard deviation in their decisions. Thus, we find evidence for conformity. Further, we find that individual's consumption choice is influenced by the group choice controlling ...
2015| Antonia Grohmann, Sahra Sakha
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DIW Discussion Papers 1524 / 2015
This paper analyses the main statistical properties of the Emerging Market Bond Index (EMBI), namely long-range dependence or persistence, non-linearities, and structural breaks, in four Latin American countries (Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela). For this purpose it uses a fractional integration framework and both parametric and semiparametric methods. The evidence based on the former is sensitive ...
2015| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Hector Carcel, Luis A. Gil-Alana
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DIW Discussion Papers 1523 / 2015
We estimate the deterrence effects of European Commission (EC) merger policy instruments over the 1990-2009 period. Our empirical results suggest that phase-1 remedies uniquely generate robust deterrence as – unlike phase-1 withdrawals, phase-2 remedies, and preventions – phase-1 remedies lead to fewer merger notifications in subsequent years. Furthermore, the deterrence effects of phase-1 remedies ...
2015| Joseph Clougherty, Tomaso Duso, Miyu Lee, Jo Seldeslachts
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DIW Discussion Papers 1522 / 2015
This work proposes a task-based methodology for the measurement of employment and investment in organisational capital (OC) in 20 OECD countries. It builds on themethodology of Squicciarini and Le Mouel (2012) and uses information from the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC). OCis defined as firm-specific organisational knowledge resulting from the performance ...
2015| Marie Le Mouel, Mariagrazia Squicciarini
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DIW Discussion Papers 1521 / 2015
This paper presents a general electricity-CO2 (ELCO) modeling framework that is able to simulate interactions of the energy-only market with different forms for national policy measures. We set up a two sector model where players can invest into various types of generation technologies including renewables, nuclear and Carbon Capture, Transport, and Storage (CCTS). For a detailed representation of ...
2015| Roman Mendelevitch, Pao-Yu Oei
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DIW Discussion Papers 1520 / 2015
Informal care by close family members is the main pillar of most longterm care systems. However, due to demographic ageing the need for long-term care is expected to increase while the informal care potential is expected to decline. From a budgetary perspective, informal care is often viewed as a cost-saving alternative to subsidized formal care. This view, however neglects that many family carers ...
2015| Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan, Thorben Korfhage
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DIW Discussion Papers 1519 / 2015
This paper investigates the effects of equity and bond portfolio inflows on exchange rate volatility, using monthly bilateral data for the US vis-a-vis eight Asian developing and emerging countries (India, Indonesia, South Korea, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines, and Taiwan) over the period 1993:01-2012:11, and estimating a time-varying transition probability Markov-switching model. We ...
2015| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Faek Menla Ali, Fabio Spagnolo, Nicola Spagnolo
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DIW Discussion Papers 1518 / 2015
This study examines foreign exchange intervention based on novel daily data covering 33 countries from 1995 to 2011. We find that intervention is widely used and an effective policy tool, with a success rate in excess of 80 percent under some criteria. The policy works well in terms of smoothing the path of exchange rates, and in stabilizing the exchange rate in countries with narrow band regimes. ...
2015| Marcel Fratzscher, Oliver Goede, Lukas Menkhoff, Lucio Sarno, Tobias Stöhr
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DIW Discussion Papers 1517 / 2015
This paper aims to verify results of the innovative study on gender identity for the USA by Bertrand et al. (2015) for Germany. They found that women who would earn more than their husbands distort their labor market outcome in order not to violate traditional gender identity norms. Using data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) we also find that the distribution of the share of income ...
2015| Anna Wieber, Elke Holst
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DIW Discussion Papers 1516 / 2015
The Netherlands have been a pivotal supplier in Western European natural gas markets in the last decades. Recent analyses show that the Netherlands would play an important role in replacing Russian supplies in Germany and France in case of Russian export disruption (Richter & Holz, 2015). However, the Netherlands have suffered from regular earthquakes in recent years that are related to the natural ...
2015| Franziska Holz, Hanna Brauers, Philipp M. Richter, Thorsten Roobeek