Search

Do Default Assignments Increase Savings of the Poor? Empirical Evidence

Although households in developing and emerging countries are relatively poor, there is potential to save. For example, one study estimates that up to 8.1% of a poor household’s budget in such countries is spent on so-called temptation goods, like alcohol, tobacco, and festivals (Banerjee and Duflo, 2007). At the same time, many households are aware of the fact that they do not save enough. They name ...

Environmental Policy and Firm Selection in the Open Economy

In this paper, we analyse the effects of a unilateral change in an emissions tax in a model of international trade with heterogeneous firms. We find a positive effect of tighter environmental policy on average productivity in the reforming country through reallocation of labour towards exporting firms. Domestic aggregate emissions fall, due to both a scale and a technique effect, but we show that the ...

Martin Bruns has successfully defended his dissertation

Martin Bruns, who works at the Forecasting and Economic Policy department, has successfully defended his dissertation at the Freie Universität Berlin.The dissertation with the title "Essays in Empirical Macroeconomics: Identification in Vector Autoregressive Models and Robust Inference in Early Warning Systems" was supervised by Prof. Dr. Helmut Lütkepohl (DIW Berlin, Freie Universität ...

Executive Board department publications

Executive Board department publications

BCCP Conference and Policy Forum 2019: Policy Roundtable: Consumer and Competition Policy in Times of Rising Corporate Power

In the closing policy roundtable about Consumer and Competition Policy in Times of Rising Corporate Power, panelists Amelia Fletcher (University of East Anglia and Centre for Competition Policy), Marit Hansen (State of Schleswig-Holstein), Stefan Hunt (UK Competition and Markets Authority), Paul Nemitz (European Commission), and moderator Hans Friederiszick (E.CA Economics) engaged in a lively...

BCCP Conference and Policy Forum 2019: Panel 2: Political Consequences of Corporate Power in Digital Markets

In the first afternoon session, Matthew Gentzkow (Stanford University) and Helen Margetts (University of Oxford) presented their research on the political consequences of corporate power in digital markets.

BCCP Conference and Policy Forum 2019: Panel 1: The Rise of Market Power

In the opening session of the BCCP Conference and Policy Forum 2019, Jan Eeckhout (Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona), Jonathan Baker (American University), and Fiona Scott Morton (Yale University) discussed the global rise of concentration, profits, mark-ups and market power across many markets and industries, the possible explanations for rising mark-ups and concentration and the role of...

Do Energy Efficiency Networks Save Energy? Evidence from German Plant-Level Data

In energy efficiency networks, groups of firms exchange experiences on energy conservation in regular meetings over several years. The companies implement energy efficiency measures in order to reach commonly agreed energy savings and CO2 reduction goals. Existing evaluations of such voluntary regional networks claim that participants improved energy efficiency at twice the speed of the industry average. ...

Gert G. Wagner Recommends "Homo Ignorans: Deliberately Choosing Not to Know" by Ralph Hertwig and Christoph Engel

Transporting and Storing High-Level Nuclear Waste in the U.S. Insights from a Mathematical Model

The nuclear industry in the United States of America has accumulated about 70,000 metric tons of high-level nuclear waste over the past decades; at present, this waste is temporarily stored close to the nuclear power plants. The industry and the Department of Energy are now facing two related challenges: (i) will a permanent geological repository, e.g., Yucca Mountain, become available in the future, ...