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China's economic policy future: state capitalism or strengthened market economy?

The DIW Berlin and the OECD Berlin Centre cordially invite you to the Berlin Lunchtime Meeting. In China the strengthening of market mechanisms hoped for by western businesses is making only slow progress. Instead the state and the Communist Party are expanding their influence in the economy. This has consequences for China's economic policy. In the past decades this has led to growing...

Child Poverty during the Recession in Germany

Social Causation Versus Health Selection in the Life Course: Does Their Relative Importance Differ by Dimension of SES?

A person’s socioeconomic status (SES) can affect health (social causation) and health can affect SES (health selection). The findings for each of these pathways may depend on how SES is measured. We study (1) whether social causation or health selection is more important for overall health inequalities, (2) whether this differs between stages of the life course, and (3) between measures of SES. Using ...

How Does Education Improve Cognitive Skills? Instructional Time versus Timing of Instruction

This paper investigates two mechanisms through which education may affect cognitive skills in adolescence, exploiting a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment to identify causal effects: between 2001 and 2007, years at academic-track high school were reduced by one, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. First, I exploit the variation over time and ...

Loneliness During a Nationwide Lockdown and the Moderating Effect of Extroversion

Loneliness levels were assessed in a longitudinal, nationwide sample (N total = 6,010) collected over the course of the first 3 months of the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. When in-person social contact restrictions were put in place, loneliness increased significantly compared to prepandemic levels but began to decrease again even before contact restrictions were eased. The loneliness costs were distributed ...

Economic Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses

The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 14 contributions of the special issue on the "Economic Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses," the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the ...

The Productivity Puzzle in Business Services

In Germany, the productivity of professional services, a sector dominated by micro and small firms, declined by 40 percent between 1995 and 2014. This productivity decline also holds true for professional services in other European countries. Using a German firm-level dataset of 700,000 observations between 2003 and 2017, we analyze this largely uncovered phenomenon among professional services, the ...

Economic Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses

The existential threat to small businesses, based on their crucial role in the economy, is behind the plethora of scholarly studies in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Examining the 15 contributions of the special issue on the “Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses,” the paper comprises four parts: a systematic review of the literature on the ...

Gleiche Erbchancen für Frauen und Männer? Zur geschlechtsspezifischen Bedeutung von Erbschaften für die Alterssicherung

In Deutschland bestehen ein Gender-Pay-Gap, ein Gender-Wealth-Gap und ein Gender-Pension-Gap zuungunsten von Frauen. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist erstens zu untersuchen, obzudem ein Gender-Inheritance-Gap vorliegt, also Männer und Frauen ungleiche Erbchancenhaben. Zweitens wird untersucht, ob Erbschaften für die Alterssicherung von Frauenund Männern gleichermaßen von Bedeutung sind. Datengrundlage ist ...

The Development of Life Goals across the Adult Lifespan

ObjectivesLife goals are important organizing units for individual agency in development. On a societal level, they align with age-normative developmental tasks; on the individual level, they guide people’s attempts at shaping their own development. This study investigates the development of life goals across the adult lifespan with a focus on differences regarding gender, parental status, education, ...