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School Entry, Afternoon Care, and Mothers’ Labour Supply

The availability of childcare is a crucial factor for mothers’ labour force participation. While most of the literature examines childcare for preschool children, we specifically focus on primary school-aged children, estimating the effect of formal afternoon care on maternal labour supply. To do so, we use a novel matching technique, entropy balancing, and draw on the rich and longitudinal data of ...

Successfully Striving for Happiness: Socially Engaged Pursuits Predict Increases in Life Satisfaction

Happiness is considered a highly desirable attribute, but whether or not individuals can actively steer their lives toward greater well-being is an open empirical question. In this study, respondents from a representative German sample reported, in text format, ideas for how they could improve their life satisfaction. We investigated which of these ideas predicted changes in life satisfaction 1 year ...

The Association between CVD-Related Biomarkers and Mortality in the Health and Retirement Survey

Background: It has become increasingly common in multiple purpose general population surveys to integrate different kinds of biomarker in the data collection process.Objective: In this article we test the predictive power of five different functional forms of CVD-related biomarkers for all-cause and CVD mortality in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS).Methods: We use five different functional forms ...

DIW president Marcel Fratzscher appointed to new Advisory Board to the United Nations

Marcel Fratzscher, president of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), will join the first meeting of the UN High-Level Advisory Board (HLAB) on Economic and Social Affairs in New York on 9-10 July 2018. The Board was set up to support the UN department of economics and social affairs (DESA) by providing advice on broad economic and social issues and making the diverse and valuable ...

Structural Vector Autoregressive Analysis

Occupational Segregation and the (Mis)allocation of Talent

In this paper, I study how occupational segregation affects the allocation of talent in a competitive labour market. I propose a model of occupational choice in which heterogeneous workers must rely on their social contacts to acquire job‐vacancy information. While occupational segregation implies benefits in terms of job‐finding probability, it also leads to allocative inefficiencies. Efficient and ...

Long Working Hours and Depressive Symptoms: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Published Studies and Unpublished Individual Participant Data

Objectives This systematic review and meta-analysis combined published study-level data and unpublished individual-participant data with the aim of quantifying the relation between long working hours and the onset of depressive symptoms. Methods We searched PubMed and Embase for published prospective cohort studies and included available cohorts with unpublished individual-participant data. We used ...

How Do Fuel Taxes Impact New Car Purchases? an Evaluation Using French Consumer-Level Data

This study evaluates the impact of fuel taxes on new car purchases, using exhaustive individual-level data of monthly new car registrations in France. We use information on the car holder to account for heterogeneous preferences across purchasers, and we identify demand parameters through the large oil price fluctuations of this period. We find that the short-term sensitivity of demand with respect ...

Natural Gas Supply: No Need for Another Baltic Sea Pipeline

The construction of a second Baltic Sea natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany (Nord Stream 2) is very controversial for political, energy economic, and ecological reasons. The project owner and some European energy companies argue that it is a profitable, private-sector investment project that is necessary to secure natural gas supplies for Germany and Europe. However, DIW Berlin analyses show ...

Natural Gas Supply: No Need for Another Baltic Sea Pipeline

The construction of a second Baltic Sea natural gas pipeline from Russia to Germany (Nord Stream 2) is very controversial for political, energy economic, and ecological reasons. The project owner and some European energy companies argue that it is a profitable, private-sector investment project that is necessary to secure natural gas supplies for Germany and Europe. However, DIW Berlin analyses show ...