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"ECB announcements lift inflation expectations by overall 20–30 basis points": seven questions to Malte Rieth

Dr. Rieth, the European Central Bank (ECB) has initiated various bond purchase programs. What exactly is it hoping to achieve? First of all, the ECB wants to stabilize inflation and inflation expectations by purchasing bonds and assets, thus lowering interest rates— especially in the long run. Long-term interest rates are important for lending to households and businesses alike. The hope is ...

ECB Asset Purchase Programs Raise Inflation Expectations in the Euro Area

Facing deflationary threats, the ECB has engaged in several forms of asset purchase programs to fulfill its mandate of maintaining price stability. A main objective of these programs is raising inflation expectations, as these are a main determinant of actual inflation. This study empirically evaluates the effectiveness of these ECB policies in raisinginflation expectations. The results suggest that ...

Developing Skills through Non-formal Learning Activities: Four Essays in the Economics of Education ; Dissertation

Kapitel 2: Obwohl die Entwicklung von Fähigkeiten bereits Gegenstand zahlreicher Forschungsvorhaben war, ist bisher wenig über die Wirkung von Musik auf kognitive und nicht-kognitive Fähigkeiten bekannt. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht auf der Basis von Daten des Sozio-ökonomischen Panels, wie sich die Ausbildung auf einem Musikinstrument in Kindheit und Jugend auf die Entwicklung von Intelligenz, ...

The Chips Are Down: The Influence of Family on Children's Trust Formation

Understanding the formation of trust at the individual level is a key issue given the impact that it has been recognized to have on economic development. Theoretical work highlights the role of the transmission of values such as trust from parents to their children. Attempts to empirically measure the strength of this transmission relied so far on the cross-sectional regression of the trust of children ...

Peer Effects in Parental Leave Decisions

This paper analyzes to what extent parental leave decisions of mothers with young children depend on the decisions made by their coworkers. The identification of peer effects, which are defined as indirect effects of the behavior of a social reference group on individual outcomes, bears various challenges due to correlated characteristics within social groups and endogenous group membership. We overcome ...

Hidden Skewness: On the Difficulty of Multiplicative Compounding under Random Shocks

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have an asymmetric distribution of outcomes. In a series of incentivized laboratory experiments, we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimatethe asymmetry or ignore it completely. Participants misperceive the spread of the outcome distribution to be too narrowband, and they estimate the median and ...

Using Personalized Feedback to Increase Data Quality and Respondents' Motivation in Web Surveys?

*****Volltextdokument auf Wunsch der Autoren gelöscht***** Web surveys technically allow providing feedback to respondents based on their previous responses. This personalized feedback may not only beused to target follow-up questions, it also allows test results to be returned immediately to respondents. This paper argues that the possibility of learning something about themselves increases respondents’ ...

Imprecise Information Disclosure and Truthful Certification

This article studies the interaction of information disclosure and reputational concerns in certification markets. We argue that by revealing information less precisely, a certifier reduces the threat of capture because this reduces her gains from selling fraudulent certificates. As a result, only imprecise disclosure rules are implementable for intermediate discount factors. Our results therefore ...

Study on past refugees helps develop possible solutions for future integration

Social scientists and economists at DIW Berlin and Humboldt University Berlin researched the integration of refugees who arrived in Germany between 1990 and 2010 – survey data indicate difficult starting conditions with employment and language skills compared to other migrants, but refugees were able to catch up over time How can we help refugees to successfully integrate into Germany society ...

Integrating Refugees: Insights from the Past: Editorial