Natural gas could play an increasing role in the German energy system following the coal exit decided in July 2020 by the German parliament. However, natural gas has no climate benefit compared to coal. What is more, Europe risks to become a battle-ground for the conflict between Russia and the United States. The construction of the Baltic Sea pipeline Nordstream 2 has set in motion a downward spiral ...
We study repayment and delinquency in an innovative loan contract that offers borrowers a wide range of flexibility. Using a large administrative dataset, we perform unsupervised pattern analysis to study how borrowers repay within the framework of this loan. We identify eight clusters that can be grouped into three distinct repayment types. We show that borrowers with fluctuating incomes and limited ...
Individuals with assets in the millions of euros have been underrepresented in population surveys and accordingly little has been known about them. As a result, the full extent of wealth concentration in Germany was unknown. To close the existing data gap, the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) integrated a special sample in which individuals with high assets are overrepresented. New calculations using this ...
Background: As a response to the spread of the coronavirus in Germany, day care centres and schools closed nationwide, leaving families to grapple with additional child care tasks. In Germany, as in many other societies, women shoulder the lion’s share of housework and child care responsibilities. While the gendered division of household labour has shifted in recent years as men have become more engaged ...
We assess whether compliance with Basel III’s main requirements, the Net Stable Funding Ratio (NSFR) and the risk-weighted Total Capital Ratio (TCR), matters for lending and stability of African banks. Banks with an NSFR or a TCR of at least the required minimum are defined as treatment group in the endogenous treatment estimations. Our results reveal that African banks complying with the capital threshold ...
Following the fall of the Iron Curtain it was important for the acceptance of the new economic and political system that the former Communist elites did not maintain their privileges, and that protesters, who helped to overturn the old system, improved their situation. With newly available panel data on East Germany’s socialist past, the German Democratic Republic, we analyze how former Communist elites, ...
We study the characteristics of inflation targeting as a shock absorber, using quarterly data for a large panel of countries. To overcome an endogeneity problem between monetary regimes and the likelihood of crises, we propose to study large natural disasters. We find that inflation targeting improves macroeconomic performance following such exogenous shocks. It lowers inflation, raises output growth, ...
Cost-utility analysis compares the monetary cost of health interventions to the associated health consequences expressed using quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). At whichthreshold the ratio of both is still acceptable is a highly contested issue. Obtaining societal valuations of the monetary value of a QALY can help in setting such threshold values but it remains methodologically challenging. A recent ...
