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Wage Determination in the Shadow of the Law: The Case of Works Councilors in Germany

The German law on co-determination at the plant level (Betriebsverfassungsgesetz) stipulates that works councilors are neither to be financially rewarded nor penalized for their activities. This regulation contrasts with publicized instances of excessive payments. The divergence has sparked a debate about the need to reform the law. This paper provides representative evidence on wage payments to works ...

Gender Pay Gap in a European Comparison: Positive Correlation between the Female Labor Force Participation Rate and the Gender Pay Gap

Public interest in the gender pay gap has risen significantly over the past years in Germany, but the size of the gender pay gap has barely changed. A comparison across European countries shows that a lower female labor force participation rate is associated with a smaller gender pay gap. The gender differences in the characteristics of the labor force, which vary across countries, are one explanation ...

SOEP Research Data Center website relaunched

As you may already have noticed: First the DIW and now the SOEP Research Data Center website has been relaunched with a crisp, user-friendly new design. Not only is it easy to use on devices other than a typical desktop computer, it also has a number of innovative features: The starting page now spotlights the research of the SOEP group at DIW Berlin, and the entire SOEP RDC website places ...

LGBTQI* People in Germany Face Staggering Health Disparities

Discrimination and rejection experienced by LGBTQI* people affect their mental health and, in the long term, their physical health as well. Survey data from the Socio-Economic Panel and Bielefeld University show that LGBTQI* people in Germany are affected by negative mental health outcomes three to four times more often than the rest of the population. Poor physical health that may be stress-related, ...

SOEPcampus@Home

The German Socio-Economic Panel Study is a representative panel study for the German population, collecting data on a broad variety of topics of everyday life, including general wellbeing, household composition, educational aspirations and educational status, income and occupational biographies, leisure time activities, housing, health, political orientation and more. With its long running panel...

Risk Preference and Entrepreneurial Investment at the Top of the Wealth Distribution

We present first evidence how individual risk preferences shape entrepreneurial investment among the very wealthy using novel survey data from the top of the wealth distribution, which have been added to the 2019 German Socio-economic Panel Study. The data include private wealth balance sheets, in particular the value of own private business assets, and a standard measure of risk tolerance. We find that ...

Merger, Product Variety and Firm Entry: the Retail Craft Beer Market in California

Ten Years after Fukushima: Nuclear Energy Is Still Dangerous and Unreliable

The catastrophic accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant on March 11, 2011, revealed unexpected safety risks of nuclear energy once again. It also accelerated the decline of nuclear energy in the international energy sector: Nuclear energy’s share of global electricity generation fell from 17 percent in 1996 to 13 percent in 2011 to approximately ten percent in 2019, with a share of primary ...

Few Top Positions in Economics Are Held by Women

Summer School on "Economic Foundations for Energy and Climate Policies"

DIW Berlin, EUI-Florence School of Regulation, Technical University Berlin, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, University College London and Université Libre de Bruxelles organized a PhD Summer School on "Economic Foundations for Energy and Climate Policies". The Summer School was held from 9th to 13th September 2019 at DIW Berlin. The second edition of the School will be...