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Jan Marcus wins Best Junior Researcher Prize of the Joachim Herz Stiftung

The Joachim Herz Foundation awards Prof. Dr. Jan Marcus with 25.000 Euro as this year's best junior researcher. Jan Marcus is a GC alumnus, a research fellow at the DIW Education and Family Department and a Junior Professor at the University of Hamburg. As such, the Graduate Center congratulates him and wishes him further success in his future work! We also congratulate Prof. Dr. Joachim Winter and ...

The Family Working-Time Model: Towards More Gender Equality in Work and Care

Since the millennium, the labour market participation of women and mothers is increasing across European countries. Several work/care policy measures underlie this evolution. At the same time, the labour market behaviour of fathers, as well as their involvement in care work, is relatively unchanging, meaning that employed mothers are facing an increased burden with respect to gainful employment and ...

Identifying Uncertainty Shocks Using the Price of Gold

We propose a new instrument to identify uncertainty shocks in a SVAR model with external instruments. The instrument is constructed by exploiting variations in the price of gold around events that capture periods of changes in uncertainty. The variations in the price of gold around the events correlate with the underlying uncertainty shocks, due to the perception of gold as a safe haven asset. To control ...

An Integrated Approach for Top-Corrected Ginis

Household survey data provide a rich information set on income, household context and demographic variables, but tend to under report incomes at the very top of the distribution. Administrative data like tax records offer more precise information on top incomes, but at the expense of household context details and incomes of non-filers at the bottom of the distribution. We combine the benefits of the ...

Signals Sell: Product Lines when Consumers Differ Both in Taste for Quality and Image Concern

This paper analyzes optimal product lines when consumers differ both in their taste for, quality and in their desire for social image. The market outcome features partial pooling and, product differentiation that is not driven by heterogeneous valuations for quality but by image, concerns. A typical monopoly outcome is a two-tier product line resembling a “masstige”, strategy as observed in luxury ...

Determinants of College Enrollment: Three Empirical Essays in the Economics of Education ; Dissertation

This dissertation consists of three self-contained research articles, each making an independent contribution to the higher education literature.

European Central Bank has to keep all its options open

Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), comments the latest ECB council meeting as follows:

Early Warning System of Government Debt Crises

The European debt crisis has revealed serious deficiencies and risks on a proper functioning of the monetary union. Against this backdrop, early warning systems are of crucial importance. In this study that focuses on euro area member states, the robustness of early warning systems to predict crises of government debt is evaluated. Robustness is captured via several dimensions, such as the chronology ...

Successful high-level conference of DIW Berlin, EU Commission and H4SF on Green Finance

More than two years after the “Paris Climate Deal” and the entry into force of the “Sustainable Development Goals”, is Europe ready to take sustainable finance to the next level, making finance work for sustainable development and for protecting our climate? This question was addressed at a high-level event in Berlin on February 22, 2018. The conference was organized by the ...

Contests with Complementarities: Theory and Experiments