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Review: DIW Europe Lecture by ECB president Mario Draghi

On Tuesday, October 25, the 2nd DIW Europe Lecture was held on “Stability, Equity and Monetary Policy”. The President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, looked at Europe’s economic and financial future: which challenges will Europe and the European Central Bank have to face in the months and years ahead? The speech held by the ECB president as well as a video of the event ...

Refuting the Cliché of the Distrustful Manager

Although trust is fundamental to social and organizational functioning, the media often portray managers as distrusting, suggesting that distrust of others is a typical personality variable of successful leaders. This study puts the cliché of the distrustful manager to the test. Both selfreport data (N = 32,926) and behavioral data (N = 924) from the German Socio-Economic Panel refute this cliché. ...

Unfair Pay and Health

This paper investigates physiological responses to perceptions of unfair pay. We use an integrated approach exploiting complementarities between controlled lab and representative panel data. In a simple principal-agent experiment agents produce revenue by working on a tedious task. Principals decide how this revenue is allocated between themselves and their agents. Throughout the experiment we record ...

Financial Literacy: Thai Middle Class Women Do Not Lag behind

This research studies the stylized fact of a “gender gap” in that women tend to have lower financial literacy than men. Our data which samples middle-class people from Bangkok does not show a gender gap. This result is not explained by men’s low financial literacy, nor by women’s high income and good education. Rather, it seems influenced by country characteristics on general gender equality and finance-related ...

Market Power and Heterogeneous Pass-through in German Electricity Retail

We analyze the pass-through of cost changes to retail tariffs in the German electricity market over the 2007 to 2014 period. We find an average pass-through rate of around 60%, which significantly varies with demand factors: while the pass-through rate to baseline tariffs, where firms have higher market power, is only 50%, it increases to 70% in the competitive segment of the market. Although the pass-through ...

Hospital-Level Policy Can Affect Physician Behavior and Reduce C-Section Rates

The past few decades have seen a considerable increase in caesarean section rates, which have now reached unprecedented levels. Concerns have been raised about the possibility of medically unnecessary procedures having negative consequences for mothers and infants (WHO, 2015). The aim of this report is to show that a properly implemented hospital-level policy may be a powerful tool for reducing the ...

Implementing Experience-Rated Liability Premiums for Individual Physicians Is Not a Good Idea: Seven Questions for Sofia Amaral-Garcia

Hospital-level policy can affect physician behavior and reduce C-section rates

The past few decades have seen a considerable increase in caesarean section rates, which have now reached unprecedented levels. Concerns have been raised about the possibility of medically unnecessary procedures having negative consequences for mothers and infants (WHO, 2015). The aim of this report is to show that a properly implemented hospital-level policy may be a powerful tool for reducing the ...

"Implementing experience-rated liability premiums for individual physicians is not a good idea": seven questions for Sofia Amaral-Garcia

The past few decades have seen a significant increase in the C-section rates of many developed countries. How much have the rates increased in Italy and Germany, the subjects of your report? We focus primarily on Italy, but we also discuss Germany to some extent—and according to OECD statistics for the year 1990, C-section rates amounted to 15 percent in Germany and approximately 20 percent ...

The Effect of Increasing Education Efficiency on University Enrollment: Evidence from Administrative Data and an Unusual Schooling Reform in Germany

We examine the consequences of compressing secondary schooling on students’ university enrollment. An unusual education reform in Germany reduced the length of academic high school while simultaneously increasing the instruction hours in the remaining years. Accordingly, students receive the same amount of schooling but over a shorter period of time, constituting an efficiency gain from an individual’s ...