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Active, or Passive? Revisiting the Role of Fiscal Policy in the Great Inflation

We reexamine whether pre-Volcker U.S. fiscal policy was active or passive. To do so, we estimate a DSGE model with monetary and fiscal policy interactions employing a sequential Monte Carlo algorithm (SMC) for posterior evaluation. Unlike existing studies, we do not have to treat each policy regime as distinct, separately estimated, models. Rather, SMC enables us to estimate the DSGE model over its entire ...

Modern state-owned firms' performance: An empirical analysis of productivity, market power and innovation

In sectors of general interests, the economic activity of the state decreased over decades as a consequence of privatisation and liberalisation. Recently, local governments began to remunicipalise in the energy and water sector, thereby creating a new and modern generation of state-owned firms.  These firms, however, differ in organisation and production environment from the state monopolists of...

Testing the Superstar Firm Hypothesis

The superstar firms model provides a compelling explanation for two simultaneously occurring phenomena: the rise of concentration in industries and the fall of labor shares. Our empirical analysis confirms two of the underlying assumptions of the model: the market share increases and the labor share decreases with increasing firm-level total factor productivity, providing support for the superstar ...

Difference-in-Differences to Identify Causal Effects of COVID-19 Policies

Policymakers have implemented a wide range of non-pharmaceutical interventions to fight the spread of COVID-19. Variation in policies across jurisdictions and over time strongly suggests a difference-in-differences (DD) research design to estimate causal effects of counter-COVID measures. We discuss threats to the validity of these DD designs and make recommendations about how researchers can avoid ...

Temporary employment and the midlife nadir in human well-being

Temporary employees rank lower than permanent employees on various measures of mental and physical health, including well-being. Furthermore, much research has indicated an approximate U-shape pattern between age and well-being with a nadir in midlife. Temporary employment may well have different associations with well-being across the lifespan, likely harming people in midlife more than...

Information Provision and Postgraduate Studies

This is the first paper to experimentally examine effects of information provision on beliefs about pecuniary and non-pecuniary returns of postgraduate education, enrollment intentions and realized enrollment. We find that our treatment causally affects beliefs measured six month after treatment. The effects on beliefs differ by gender and academic background, and we find that stated enrollment intentions ...

Tomaso Duso appointed to EU Commission’s advisory group

European Commission’s Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager has approved Tomaso Duso’s appointment as member of the Economic Advisory Group on Competition Policy (EAGCP) at the European Commission's Directorate General for Competition. The three years mandate starts on June 2020. The EAGCP creates a discussion forum on competition policy matters between academics who have a ...

Mobile Money is Driving Financial Development in Africa

Mobile money is an innovation that allows financial transactions to be performed via a cell phone. Even in poor regions of Africa, almost everyone has a cell phone; therefore, mobile money could both contribute to the continent’s economic growth and ensure that no Africans are excluded from access to financial services. However, DIW Berlin data from Uganda show that mobile money is actually used less ...

SOEP-IS 2018 – Survey Report on the 2018 SOEP Innovation Sample

Attrition and Selectivity of the NEPS Starting Cohorts: An Overview of the Past 8 Years

This article documents the number of target persons participating in the panel surveys of the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS) as well as the number of respondents who temporarily dropout and of those leaving the panel (attrition). NEPS comprises panel surveys with six mutually exclusive starting cohorts covering the complete life span. Sample sizes, numbers of participants and temporary as ...