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Five new members appointed to the SOEP Survey Committee

At its meeting in early November 2021, the DIW Board of Trustees appointed five new members to the SOEP Survey Committee. In the coming years, they and the rest of the Survey Committee will advise the SOEP team on the content and methodology of the surveys, as well as on SOEP’s research and services. Economist Conchita D’Ambrosio is a professor at the University of Luxembourg. She conducts ...

Public Good Provision and Local Employment: Evidence from Grammar School Closures in East Germany

This paper assesses the impact of public good provision on the spatial distribution of employment as predicted by a local labor market model that allows for commuting. Using local grammar school closures in East Germany after 2000 in a difference-in-differences estimation framework coupled with an entropy balancing strategy, we find that the school closures triggered a decline in the number of (employed) ...

Nuclear Turn: Closing Down Nuclear Power Plants Opens up Prospects for the Final Repository Site Search

With the closure of the final six nuclear power plants, the commercial use of nuclear energy for electricity generation in Germany will come to an end in 2022. Due to the German power system's sufficient capacities—in 2020, the sector exported 20 terawatt hours (TWh), or about four percent of its electricity production—and its integration into the European electricity system, there is no reason to ...

Adrian Santonja receives the doctoral scholarship from the German Environmental Foundation (Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt DBU). Congratulations!

Congratulations to Adrian Santonja for receiving the doctoral scholarship from the German Environmental Foundation. Being one of Europe's largest foundations, it promotes innovative exemplary projects in the field of environmental protection. Overall up to 60 PhD scholars are funded per year for a period of 36 months. 

Internet, Social Media, and the Behavior of Politicians: Evidence from Facebook in Brazil

The Impact of Having Children on Domain-Specific Life Satisfaction: A Quasi-Experimental Longitudinal Investigation Using the Socio-Economic Panel (Soep) Data

Longitudinal studies have documented improvements in parents’ life satisfaction due to childbearing, followed by postpartum adaptation back to baseline. However, the details underlying this process remain largely unexplored. Based on past literature, set-point theory, and results from an exploratory sample, we investigated empirically how first childbirth affected satisfaction with specific domains ...

Owner-Occupied Housing Costs and Monetary Policy: Goals and Challenges for the Euro Area: In-Depth Analysis

Owner-occupied housing costs represent an important expenditure for households and should be included in the Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices. Conceptual and practical challenges must be resolved before this can be implemented. Estimates suggest that these costs would have a small impact on monetary policy. At the same time, different degrees of home ownership in the euro area mean that their inclusion ...

The ECB’s Communication Strategy: Limits and Challenges after the Financial Crisis: In-Depth Analysis

Given its central role in public accountability and in the formation of expectations, it is important to reflect on ways to improve the ECB’s communication policy. Communication should not generally strive for maximum transparency. The optimum degree of transparency varies between different aspects of monetary policy and banking supervision. Although the ECB already communicates very openly with the ...

Germany's Shift from Coal Offers Lessons for Just Transition Policy

As COP26 drew to a close earlier this month, almost 200 nations agreed to “phase down” coal power in the coming years. How this is done, for coal and other fossil fuels, will have implications for individuals and communities that depend on these resources for their livelihoods.  The first case study conducted by DIW Berlin focuses on Germany and the efforts it has undertaken to support ...

Increasing employment and family care? A structural analysis of pension and long-term care policy reforms

We develop a comprehensive life-cycle model of elder parent care and work to evaluate options that address pressing conflicts between pension and long-term care (LTC) policies. Many OECD countries react to challenges of demographic change by increasing LTC by family members (informal care) and raising retirement ages. This intensifies conflicts between paid employment and informal care provision....