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Weighting in PIAAC-L 2015

Income Redistribution and Self-Selection of Immigrants: Evidence from Administrative Data

We test the predictions of the Roy-Model about the self-selection of immigrants using an administrative dataset including about 90 % of Italians living abroad. The data comprises 13 countries with substantial differences in inequality and levels of redistribution: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Great-Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, New-Zealand, Switzerland, the US, and...

Substantial Labor Market Effects of the Residency Status: How Important Are Initial Conditions at Arrival for Immigrants?

This paper uses information on the legal status upon arrival to study long-term labor market effects, whereas selection and potential outmigration are taken into account by a large set of methods. I find that immigrants arrived with a job commitment in Germany achieve a longterm income advantage of 18.6% relative to other migrant groups, while language skills and ethnic networks can be excluded as ...

Optimal Taxation under Different Concepts of Justness

A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We reconcile this puzzle by generalizing the optimal taxation framework by Saez (2002) to allow for alternatives to welfarism. ...

A new Sonderweg? The trans-Atlantic clash over crisis policy 2008-2018

Transatlantic economic relations are at a difficult moment. There is talk of a trade wars. The immediate cause is the election of Donald Trump and his team of economic nationalists. But tensions between Europe and America over economic policy are not merely an effect of America’s populism. Particularly between Germany and the US deep divides opened up in the period of the financial crisis of...

Identifying Age Penalty in Women's Wages: New Method and Evidence from Germany 1984-2014

Given theoretical premises, gender wage gap adjusted for individual characteristics is likely to vary over age. We extend DiNardo, Fortin and Lemieux (1996) semi-parametric technique to disentangle year, cohort and age effects in adjusted gender wage gaps. We rely on a long panel of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel covering the 1984-2015 period. Our results indicate that the gender wage gap ...

Free Daycare and Its Effects on Children and Their Families

Many governments invest substantial public funds to foster early childhood education. And yet, there are still many open questions who responds to and who benefits from public investments into early childcare. We use the introduction of free public daycare in German states to analyze its effects on children and their families. Our results suggest that effects of the policy differ by child age, gender ...

Opening the Black Box of Energy Modelling: Strategies and Lessons Learned

The global energy system is undergoing a major transition, and in energy planning and decision-making across governments, industry and academia, models play a crucial role. Because of their policy relevance and contested nature, the transparency and open availability of energy models and data are of particular importance. Here we provide a practical how-to guide based on the collective experience of ...

Reasonable Sample Sizes for Convergence to Normality

The central limit theorem says that, provided an estimator fulfills certain weak conditions, then, for reasonable sample sizes, the sampling distribution of the estimator converges to normality. We propose a procedure to find out what a “reasonably large sample size” is. The procedure is based on the properties of Gini's mean difference decomposition. We show the results of implementations of the procedure ...

AfD received more votes in the parliamentary election in rural areas with aging populations

DIW Berlin study analyzes the correlation between the AfD's vote performance and different economic and sociodemographic variables at an electoral district level – The AfD performed well in western German electoral districts where there are many employees in the manufacturing industry and where incomes are low – In the eastern districts they performed better where there is a large share ...