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“Climate protection benefits the entire economy”: The Department of Energy, Transportation, Environment

[English subtitles, German language video] How does environmental protection affect the economy? How can we secure the energy supply of the future, and what role does transportation play in this? These are the questions addressed by the Department of Energy, Transportation, and Environment at DIW Berlin. “Continuous global warming is costly and destroys our environment, endangers our livelihoods,...

Energy Transition Monitor: Momentum Is Still Insufficient for the Expansion of Renewables, Electrification, and Storage

Electricity generation from solar and wind energy is set to expand massively in Germany in order to replace fossil fuels through electrification across all sectors. The DIW Energy Transition Monitor paints a mixed picture for the first half of 2026: Renewable energy is expanding, but must be accelerated further to meet 2030 targets. This includes photovoltaics: Despite earlier successes, it is currently ...

Industrial Relations and Working From Home in Germany During the COVID-19 Pandemic

We investigate the role of industrial relations for working from home during and after the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 2020 to 2023 and a special COVID sample (SOEP-CoV) for 2020 and 2021, we examine how collective bargaining and plant-level co-determination are associated with the incidence and frequency of working from home. Controlling ...

Confidence-Based End-to-End Extraction of Large Historical Economic Tables with LLMs

Optical document recognition has made great progress in recent years. However, large historical tables still pose substantial challenges because of poor scan quality, irregular layouts, and the sheer number of table cells. Table transcription tools perform well on small tables but struggle with large ones. Most publications report transcription quality on benchmark data sets. From a practical perspective, ...

SOEPcampus@DIW Berlin: workshop on October 6-7, 2026

On October 6 and 7, 2026 we are organizing a two-day in-person workshop on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at DIW Berlin. In addition to presentations on the study itself, its data structure, sampling design, and weighting strategy, hands-on sessions will offer a practical approach to the data and its potential. The workshop is aimed at researchers of all qualification levels who want to work with ...

Sabine Zinn Appointed to Monitoring Panel for the National Action Plan for Child Opportunities (NAP Kinderchancen)

Prof. Dr. Sabine Zinn, Director of the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at DIW Berlin, has been appointed by the German Federal Ministry of Education, Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth as an expert advisor and member of the monitoring panel for the National Action Plan (NAP) for Child Opportunities (Nationaler Aktionsplan "Neue Chancen für Kinder in Deutschland"). The action plan implements ...

Berlin Macro Seminar

The Intergenerational Association between Migration and Early Childhood Development in Germany: A Comparative Cross-Sectional Study of Forced and Voluntary Migrant Families (2004–2021)

Background: Family migration shapes early childhood development (ECD), but the link between parental voluntary versus forced migration experiences and ECD remains underexplored. Germany, with its diverse migration streams, offers an opportunity to investigate this interrelation. Objective: This study examines the link between parental migration status and ECD of children aged 2–4 and investigates ...

Personality Traits of Entrepreneurs and the Size of their Firms

In this study, we examine the relationship between personality traits, captured by risk tolerance and the Big Five traits, and firm size, as measured by the number of employees. We show that the personality of entrepreneurs matters for the size of their firm they operate. We use a novel add-on to the German Socio-Economic Panel that includes a sub-sample of owner-managers running larger firms. High ...

Increases in spending have a significantly greater impact than tax cuts