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Presentation of the new World Bank Group report: “Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016: Taking on Inequality”

On Wednesday, December 14, after a short introduction by Marcel Fratzscher, World Bank Group economists Mario Negre and Christoph Lakner will present the latest report from the Poverty and Shared Prosperity series, “Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2016: Taking on Inequality,” with a focus on its key findings. The presentation will be followed by a panel discussion moderated by Kati ...

The Parental Leave Benefit: A Key Family Policy Measure, One Decade Later

On January 1, 2017, the parental leave benefit will be celebrating its tenth anniversary. Although its implementation was fervidly debated, it has become a widely accepted family policy measure. Its impact on parental labor supply, the division oflabor between parents, fertility, and indicators that reflect the well-being of parents and children have been examined from a variety of perspectives. A ...

The Parental Leave Benefit Has Increased Average Household Income for Young Families in the First Year: Six Questions for Katharina Wrohlich

Who Bears the Burden of Social Security Contributions in Germany? Evidence from 35 Years of Administrative Data

This paper provides evidence over a long time period on the question of who bears the burden of social security contributions (SSC) in Germany. Following Alvaredo et al. (2016) we exploit kinks in the budget set generated by a drop in the marginal SSC rate at earnings caps. Based on cross-sectional earnings distributions the framework does not rely on policy reforms. Applying the approach to administrative ...

Impact of the Capital Requirements Regulation (CRR) on the Access to Finance for Business and Long-Term Investments: Final Report

The Role of Time Preferences in Educational Decision Making

We analyze the implication of time-inconsistent preferences in educational decision making and corresponding policies using a structural dynamic choice model. Based on a novel identification approach, we exploit variation in average years invested in degree attainment through various educational reforms to identify the discount factor of hyperbolic time preferences. We make two important research contributions. ...

Forced migration, arrival in Germany, and first steps toward integration

A new representative survey of a total of 4,500 recently arrived refugees to Germany conducted by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), the Research Centre of the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF-FZ), and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin) has generated an entirely new database for analyzing forced migration and the ...

DIW Europe Lecture with Barry Eichengreen

On Tuesday, December 13, the 3rd DIW Europe Lecture will be held on “The Populist Turn in American Politics: Implications for Europe”. In this lecture Professor Barry Eichengreen, Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley, will trace the populist turn in American politics from the late 19th century to the present day. The DIW Europe Lecture ...

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 ...