How do labor demand shocks affect workforce diversity in the absence of targeted diversity policies? A conceptual framework illustrates the potential trade-off between the demographic and quality composition of a workforce when there is a positive labor demand shock. Exploiting the German reunification as a natural experiment, we analyze the academic labor market where nearly all social sciences professors ...
This research project examines the design and efficiency of electricity markets in which power is traded sequentially through forward and spot markets. Its empirical focus is on European electricity markets, where the growing share of renewable energy is changing firms’ incentives, trading strategies, and exposure to price risk. The project investigates how renewable energy support schemes and...
Divorce reshapes family life, yet little is known about one of its most consequential features: the allocation of child custody. We study the impact of joint versus sole custody on both parents and children using rich administrative data from Sweden linked to over 25 years of newly-collected court custody rulings. To address selection concerns, we exploit random assignment of custody disputes to judges ...
AI can raise productivity by extracting information from rich data, yet little is known about how experts weigh AI-generated signals against established decision-support tools. We conduct a nationwide survey experiment with 372 Danish primary care physicians (21.5% of all clinics), who make diagnostic and treatment decisions on urinary tract infection vignettes before and after receiving a...
A team from the Energy, Transportation, and Environment department presented its latest research at International Association for Energy Economics (IAEE) held in Munich from September 6 to 9, 2026. Lukas Barner, a doctoral candidate at the DIW Graduate Center since 2024, won the Best Poster Award for his poster titled “Carbon Capture, Transportation, and Storage: Modeling Potential Infrastructure ...
In this study, we examine the relationship between personality traits, captured by risk tolerance and the Big Five traits, and firm size, as measured by the number of employees. We show that the personality of entrepreneurs matters for the size of their firm they operate. We use a novel add-on to the German Socio-Economic Panel that includes a sub-sample of owner-managers running larger firms. High ...
Dr. Thomas Meissner, Associate Professor in the Department of Microeconomics and Public Economics at Maastricht University's School of Business and Economics, was a Visiting Researcher at SOEP at DIW Berlin from June 11 to July 19, 2026. During his stay, the behavioral economist participated in SOEP seminars and the SOEP Conference and engaged in discussions with researchers from across SOEP. ...
The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique context for understanding how parents balance labor supply and childcare when schools close. Although school restrictions in Germany left most workers unaffected, households with children of elementary school age redistributed their labor: Full-time employment among mothers who had only children of elementary school age fell by four to five percentage points ...
