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Firm Financing and the Relative Demand for Labor and Capital

During both the 2008 and the COVID crises, aggregate employment in Europe and the US fell despite continuing growth in the aggregate capital stock. Using more than one million firm-year observations of small and medium European firms between 2003 and 2018, this paper introduces new stylized facts on how firms’ relative demand for labor and capital evolved as their capital structure adjusted to the ...

Benign Effects of Automation: New Evidence from Patent Texts

The Productivity Riddle in Business Services

This is an online seminar using Cisco Webex. You will receive the login data with the invitation to the talk. Abstract:   A fast growing and diverse literature has addressed one of the riddles of economic developments: the declining labor productivity growth in almost all advanced economies. One of the reasons discussed is the shift towards service industries with inherently low...

Text Analysis: Methods and Applications for Economics and Finance

Ein immer größerer Teil der menschlichen Kommunikation - von E-Mails über Produktbewertungen bis hin zu Tweets - wird als digitaler Text aufgezeichnet. Das Analysieren und Verstehen dieser riesigen Datenmengen wird für die wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Forschung und insbesondere für Marktanalysen immer wichtiger. Dieser Kurs bietet eine vertiefende Einführung in die Theorie und Praxis der...

Better off without the Euro? A Structural VAR Assessment of European Monetary Policy

Modern OCA theory has developed different conclusions on when forming a currency union is beneficial. An important pragmatic question in this context is: Did delegating monetary policy to the ECB increase stress in the individual euro area countries? An SVAR analysis reveals that monetary stress has declined more in the euro area than in the euro areas’ doppelganger. The synthetic doppelganger is composed ...

The Storm-Impervious Financial Sector: Offshore Services Likely Booked Abroad

The high international capital positions of offshore financial centers (OFCs) have led to increasing research in the area. However, many unanswered questions remain, as OFC activities are secretive by nature and data is sparse. It is, for example, not even clear whether the financial industry actually physically operates on OFCs or if it artificially books services from other countries. Using a new ...

The Effects of a Parenting Program on Maternal Well-Being: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

This paper evaluates how a light-touch parenting program for parents of children below school entry age affects maternal family well-being. We analyze data from a randomized controlled trial focusing on non-disadvantaged parents. Overall, results show no short-term effects but a relatively large positive effect of the intervention on maternal family well-being in the medium term. With a 20- to 30-percent ...

How People Know Their Risk Preference

People differ in their willingness to take risks. Recent work found that revealed preference tasks (e.g., laboratory lotteries)—a dominant class of measures—are outperformed by survey-based stated preferences, which are more stable and predict real-world risk taking across different domains. How can stated preferences, often criticised as inconsequential “cheap talk,” be more valid and predictive ...

SOEP-Core v35 – PFLEGE: Documentation of Generated Person-level Long-term Care Variables

“Nationwide Corona Monitoring” (RKI-SOEP Study): Survey to track COVID-19 infection and immunity in the German population

The SOEP’s longitudinal samples (SOEP-Core, SOEP-IS) provide an opportunity to carry out supplementary surveys of a large, representative sample of the German population. From mid-September to mid-November, the SOEP at DIW Berlin and the Robert Koch Institute will be conducting voluntary COVID-19 infection and antibody tests on adult survey respondents in around 21,000 SOEP households. Participants ...