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DIW Discussion Papers 1390 / 2014
This paper studies the association between a country’s level of financial development and firms’ employment growth. We employ an incomplete contract model for evaluating this association. The model proposes that a high level of financial development affects the employment of firms with low managerial capital negatively, while firms with high managerial capital benefit from a more developed financial ...
2014| Dorothea Schäfer, Susan Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1389 / 2014
To counteract the financial pressure emerging in aging societies, statutory pay‐as‐you‐go pension schemes are undergoing fundamental reforms in many Western countries. Starting with cohort 1937, Germany introduced permanent pension deductions for early retirement. This paper examines the evolution of the profitability of pension contributions against the background of this reform for cohorts 1935‐1945. ...
2014| Holger Lüthen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1388 / 2014
In structural vector autoregressive analysis identifying the shocks of interest via heteroskedasticity has become a standard tool. Unfortunately, the approaches currently used for modelling heteroskedasticity all have drawbacks. For instance, assuming known dates for variance changes is often unrealistic while more exible models based on GARCH or Markov switching residuals are difficult to handle from ...
2014| Helmut Lütkepohl, Aleksei Netsunajev
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DIW Discussion Papers 1387 / 2014
The 2014 reform of the German Renewable Energy Act introduces a mandatory shift from a fixed feed-in tariff to a floating premium system. This is envisaged to create additional incentives for project developers, but also impacts revenues and costs for new investments in wind generation. Thus uncertainties for example about balancing costs and the impact of the location specific generation profile on ...
2014| Matthew Tisdale, Thilo Grau, Karsten Neuhoff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1386 / 2014
This paper provides some new empirical evidence on the weekend effect, one of the most recognized anomalies in financial markets. Two different methods are used: (i) a trading robot approach to examine whether or not there is such an anomaly giving rise to exploitable profit opportunities by replicating the actions of traders; (ii) a fractional integration technique for the estimation of the (fractional) ...
2014| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis Gil-Alana, Alex Plastun, Inna Makarenko
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DIW Discussion Papers 1385 / 2014
The reduced attractiveness of investments in reliable power plants under conditions of liberalized markets and the transition towards renewable energies has brought a discussion on capacity policies to Europe. We use a partial equilibrium model to compare important effects of three basic policies. A strategic reserve policy and a capacity market policy with administratively set capacity targets, and ...
2014| Thure Traber
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DIW Discussion Papers 1384 / 2014
We report results of a survey of a representative sample of the German population in which respondents were asked for their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for either an extension of their life or an improvement in their health corresponding to a gain of one quality-adjusted life year (QALY). While one version of the survey exactly copied the questionnaire used in the EuroVaQ project (Pennington et al. 2014), ...
2014| Marlies Ahlert, Friedrich Breyer, Lars Schwettmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1383 / 2014
The Russian-Ukrainian crisis has revitalized the European concerns of supply disruptions of natural gas as experienced in 2006 and 2009. However, the European supply situation, regulation and infrastructure have changed since: imports aremore diversified, EU member states better connected and a common regulation on the security of supply has been introduced. Nevertheless, several East European countries ...
2014| Philipp M. Richter, Franziska Holz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1382 / 2014
This paper investigates the usefulness of the money demand relationship in times of unconventional monetary policies by cointegration methods. In contrast to the bulk of the literature, evidence in favour of a stable long run money demand function is presented both for the US and the euro area. Results are based on standard monetary aggregates, i.e. MZM for the US and M3 in case of the euro area. The ...
2014| Christian Dreger, Jürgen Wolters
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DIW Discussion Papers 1381 / 2014
Political instability of several countries in the Middle East is overshadowing one of the biggest challenges of the upcoming century: Water - a natural resource that is easily taken for granted, but whose scarcity might lead to serious conflicts. This paper investigates an optimal Water Allocation of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivershed by introducing the WATER-Model. A series of scenarios are analyzed ...
2014| Pao-Yu Oei, Markus Siehlow
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DIW Discussion Papers 1380 / 2014
Lack of transmission capacity hampers the integration of the European electricity market, and thereby precludes reaping the full benefits of competition. We investigate the extent to which transmission grid expansion promotes competition, efficiency and welfare. This work proposes a three-stage model for grid investment: a benevolent planner decides on network upgrades, considering welfare benefits ...
2014| Alexander Zerrahn, Daniel Huppmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1379 / 2014
The transformation of the European energy system requires substantial investment in transmission capacity to facilitate cross-border trade and to efficiently integrate renewable energy sources. However, network planning in the EU is still mainly a national prerogative. In contrast to other studies aiming to identify the pan-European (continental) welfare-optimal transmission expansion, we investigate ...
2014| Daniel Huppmann, Jonas Egerer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1378 / 2014
The common European electricity market requires both market integration and transmission grid expansion, including trans-border interconnectors. Although the benefits of increased interconnectivity are widely acknowledged, expansion of interconnectors is often very slow. This paper gathers insights on the reasons behind this “grid-lock” drawing on the study of the German-Polish border. Although two ...
2014| Lidia Puka, Kacper Szulecki
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DIW Discussion Papers 1377 / 2014
One of the leading criticisms of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is the presence of so-called “anomalies”, i.e. empirical evidence of abnormal behaviour of asset prices which is inconsistent with market efficiency. However, most studies do not take into account transaction costs. Their existence implies that in fact traders might not be able to make abnormal profits. This paper examines whether ...
2014| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis Gil-Alana, Alex Plastun, Inna Makarenko
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DIW Discussion Papers 1376 / 2014
Do timing and time diversification improve the average investor's stock market return? Contrary to literature's scenario of wealthy investors, average investors invest each month over life. Many purchases prevent investors from buying at peak, but horizons decrease, giving latter investments less time to offset losses. This paper accommodates timing using internal rates of return, facilitating the ...
2014| Dirk Ulbricht
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DIW Discussion Papers 1375 / 2014
This paper investigates whether there are bubbles in stock prices. We do this using a previously studied structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model claiming to distinguish fundamental and non-fundamental shocks to real stock prices. TheSVAR model relies on an identification restriction in order to correctly label the shocks. We test this restriction by means of a Markov switching-SVAR (MS-SVAR) ...
2014| Anton Velinov, Wenjuan Chen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1374 / 2014
This paper investigates empirically the consumer demand of environmentally relevant goods for Germany, as well as their relationship to the demand for leisure. Higher prices for energy goods like gas, electricity or fuel oil due to higher indirecttaxation amongst others may have serious welfare and distributional effects for households. Also, there is very little evidence of the labor market implications ...
2014| Martin Beznoska
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DIW Discussion Papers 1373 / 2014
We investigate the welfare impact of parallel imports using a large panel data set containing monthly information on sales, ex-factory prices, and further product characteristics for all 700 anti-diabetic drugs sold in Germany between 2004 and 2010. We estimate a two-stage nested logit model of demand and, based on an oligopolistic model of multiproduct firms, we then recover the marginal costs and ...
2014| Tomaso Duso, Annika Herr, Moritz Suppliet
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DIW Discussion Papers 1372 / 2014
In this paper we investigate natural gas producer's reactions to changes in market prices. We estimate price elasticities of aggregated supply in the most competitive market for natural gas: the United States. Using monthly time series data form 1987 to 2012 our analysis is based on an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bound Cointegration approach to obtain short and long-run elasticities of natural ...
2014| Micaela Ponce, Anne Neumann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1371 / 2014
The impact of environmental regulation on technology diffusion and innovations is studied using a unique data set of German residential buildings. We analyze how energy efficiency regulations, in terms of minimum standards, affects energy-use in newly constructed buildings and how it induces innovation in the residential-building industry. The data used consists of a large sample of German apartment ...
2014| Makram El-Shagi, Claus Michelsen, Sebastian Rosenschon