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Call for Papers "Vierteljahrshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung": EU Capital Markets Union – alluring opportunity or blind alley?

Editors: Hans-Helmut Kotz and Dorothea Schäfer On September 30, 2015, the European Commission (EU COM) adopted an action plan to create a European Capital Markets Union. To reduce the alleged gap to the U.S.A. as the frontier financial system in financing Small- and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) as well as infrastructures, the EU COM aims at creating a more market-based and unified financing ...

Heterogeneity in Price Responsiveness for Residential Space Heating in Germany

Space heating and hot water expenditures make up the majority of household energy demand in Germany, at 83.2%, making them an attractive target for energy policies. Using a panel dataset derived from yearly residential household surveys covering the years 1996 to 2014, we identify the determinants of heating expenditures for German households. We discover significant heterogeneity in expenditures depending ...

Distributional price effects of rent controls in Berlin

An enormous increase of initial rents in many German cities over the last decade has prompted the current grand coalition to implement a new rent control called "Mietpreisbremse" in 2015 (literally a brake on rental prices). This reform aims to stop exploding rents and to provide particularly more affordable rental housing in the lower and medium rental price segment. Since then, rental prices of...

"Ex post Merger Evaluation in the U.K. Retail Market for Books" has been short-listed for the Antitrust Writing Awards

Tomaso Duso's paper "Ex post Merger Evaluation in the U.K. Retail Market for Books" (joint with Luca Aguzzoni, Elena Argentesi, Lorenzo Ciari, and Massimo Tognoni), published in the Journal of Industrial Economics, 2016, 64, 1, 170-200, has been short-listed for the Antitrust Writing Awards in the category  “Best Articles - economics”. This category prizes the best articles published ...

Griechenland am Scheideweg: Innovation, ja oder nein?

The Impact of Stress on Tournament Entry

Individual willingness to enter competitive environments predicts career choices and labor market outcomes. Meanwhile, many people experience competitive contexts as stressful. We use two laboratory experiments to investigate whether factors related to stress can help explain individual differences in tournament entry. Experiment 1 studies whether stress responses (measured as salivary cortisol) to ...

Mentoring of Refugees (MORE)

The scientific study MORE is designed to deliver first results on the role of civic engagement in the short- and long-term integration of refugees in Germany. The intervention study is being carried out by the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) in partnership with the Institute for Employment Research (IAB). It is funded through the Leibniz...

Lack of equal rights regarding financial decisions contributes to women’s lower level of financial literacy

DIW Berlin examined the causes for the gender gap in financial literacy in several countries – Cultural factors play a key role in addition to income, education, and experience – Better financial literacy would mean more financial security for women in retirement In most countries of the world, women know less about financial matters than men. Socio-demographic factors such as income, ...

Top of the Class: the Importance of Ordinal Rank

This paper establishes a new fact about educational production: ordinal academic rank during primary school has long-run impacts on later achievement that are independent from underlying ability. Using data on the universe of English school students, we examine a setting in which the same baseline score on a national standardized test can correspond to different ranks among students situated in...

The gender gap in financial literacy: income, education, and experience offer only partial explanations

In most countries, women have a lower level of financial literacy than men on average. This report demonstrates that differences in income and education and less experience in financial matters only provide a partial explanation for the gender gap. Data from various countries show that cultural differences may also play a role. In order to close the gender gap in financial literacy, schools should ...