Search

The Impact of Free Trade Agreements on Middle East and North Africa Exports of Intermediate and Final Goods

This paper is the first to analyse the impact of free trade agreements (FTAs) and the harmonisation of rules of origin (RoO) on Middle East and North African (MENA) countries’ exports differentiating between final and intermediate goods for a global sample of trade partners. Data on exports from four MENA countries (Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia) to 61 destinations over the period 1995–2016 are ...

Topic Crime

Topic Crime

Environmentally-Responsible Households: Irresponsible Corporate Lobbying

How do firms respond to greener household preferences? We construct a novel index of environmental willingness to act on the state-quarter level based on Google Trends search data. Relating the index to firm-level information on the U.S. auto- motive sector from 2006 to 2019, we find ambiguous results. On average, firms innovate more in electric, hydrogen, and hybrid (clean) technologies and reduce ...

Robin Sogalla has successfully defended his dissertation

On October 1, 2025, Robin Sogalla successfully completed his dissertation entitled „International Trade and Climate Policy: The Role of Firm Heterogeneity“ with summa cum laude at the Technische Universität Berlin. The dissertation was submitted and successfully defended by Robin as part of the doctoral programme in economics. The committee consisted of Prof. Tomaso Duso (DIW Berlin and TU Berlin), ...

The Persuasiveness of Different Sources of Information on the Decision to Vaccinate: A Cross-Sectional Study in Germany During the Pandemic at the Turn of the Year 2021/2022

Health information about vaccinations is communicated via various sources of information and is crucial for vaccination decisions. Information sources such as interpersonal sources, traditional print and digital media as well as social media offer information about the risks and benefits of vaccination. During health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic was, some information sources provide hanging ...

Composition of Core Modules and Item Allocation in Split Questionnaire Designs: Impact on Estimates from Imputed Data

An increasing number of social science surveys use split questionnaire designs to reduce questionnaire length, presenting only a subset of several questionnaire modules to each respondent while leaving out others. This approach results in large amounts of planned missing data that necessitates imputation. Research shows that imputation is most effective when each module covers various topics. Yet, ...

Impact of ESG Performance on the Cost of Capital in the Energy, Utilities, and Basic Materials Sectors

This paper explores the presence of an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) premium for firms operating in the energy, utilities, and basic materials sectors. Specifically, we examine the influence of ESG performance on firms’ cost of capital in both debt and equity markets. We apply a measure of the ex ante implied cost of equity and the cost of debt to a global sample of over 24,000 firm-year ...

The gap between the rich and poor states is widening more and more

Productivity gap has nearly disappeared in rural regions

Fiscal Capacity of German Federal States: East-West Gap Narrows, but Rich-Poor Divide Grows

Even now, 35 years after German unification, the economic power and fiscal capacity of the eastern German federal states remain below average. In Germany’s system of fiscal federalism, this leads to substantial financial transfers, a fact that repeatedly triggers political debate. Thereby, the low tax revenue of the economically weak states is also a consequence of the tax system—and by no means a ...