The self-employed are among those facing the highest probability of strong income losses during the COVID-19 pandemic. Governments in many countries introduced support programs to support the self-employed, including the German federal government, which approved a €50bn emergency aid program at the end of March 2020 offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing...
Melissa Newham, who works at the Firms and Markets department, has successfully defended her dissertation at the KU Leuven. The dissertation with the title "Essays on the Economics of the Pharmaceutical Industry" was supervised by Jo Seldeslachts (KU Leuven and DIW Berlin). We congratulate Melissa on her success and wish her all the best for her future career!
People sometimes choose to remain ignorant, even when information comes at low marginal costs and promises high utility. To investigate whether older adults enlist deliberate ignorance more than younger adults, potentially as an emotion-regulation tool, we presented a representative sample of 1,910 residents of Germany with 13 scenarios in which knowledge could result in substantial gains or losses. ...
Both wages and needs-adjusted household income increased by ten percent between 2013 and 2018, benefiting all income groups. Wage inequality has been declining for many years and has now again reached the level of the early 2000s. At the same time, the low-wage sector shrank by two percentage points. Household income inequality, in contrast, has hardly changed for many years and the low-income rate ...
The Collaborative Research Center Transregio “Rationality and Competition” combines the research programs of behavioral and neoclassical economists to study applied economic questions that are of high policy relevance. The focus CRC TRR 190 is on the economic behavior and performance of individuals and firms: How do systematic biases in expectations, decision processes, and preferences affect the...
Research background: We are guided by concepts linking political trust with the perceived rank of people in the wealth hierarchy, their confidence in other people, and the means they use to learn about events at home and abroad.Purpose of the article: The aim of the article is to assess and analyse at the micro level the impact of subjective welfare, interpersonal trust and the intensity of usage of ...
