Economists consider personality traits to be stable, particularly throughout adulthood. However, evidence from psychological studies suggests that the stability assumption may not always be valid, as personality traits can respond to certain life events. Our paper analyzes whether and to what extent personality traits are malleable over a time span of eight years for a sample of working individuals. ...
This paper proposes a rating methodology that is based on a non-linear classification method, a support vector machine, and a non-parametric isotonic regression for mapping rating scores into probabilities of default. We also propose a four data set model validation and training procedure that is more appropriate for credit rating data commonly characterised with cyclicality and panel features. Tests ...
Ownership of publicly listed German companies has undergone significant changes in recent years. The aim of this report is to document these trends since 2007 and analyze the extent to which firms that compete in the same product market are owned by the same investors, which is known as common ownership. We show that some large foreign institutional investors have overtaken domestic investors and now ...
Mr Seldeslachts, could you please explain the term "common ownership"? Common ownership means that one investor has shares in several companies at the same time. If you want to be even more precise it would be the same owner or investor having shares in several companies that compete in the same market. [...]
Our new brochure “Living in Germany” offers a compact source of information about the kinds of research currently being done with SOEP data and key findings from these studies. In it, we present a selection of research results with significant implications for society and policy making from the more than 7,000 papers published to date using SOEP data. And we introduce some of the researchers ...
Friederike Lenel, who worked at the Development and Security department, has successfully defended her dissertation at the Humboldt University Berlin. The dissertation with the title "Informal Support and Insurance - The interplay between inter-household support arrangements and access to alternative risk management resources" was supervised by Prof. Georg Weizsäcker, Ph.D. (DIW Berlin, ...
If the desire is to provide tax relief to households with lower and middle incomes in Germany, it is necessary to target the valueadded tax rather than the personal income tax. Lowering the standard value-added tax rate by one percentage point (from 19 to 18 percent) would mean relief worth 11 billion euro for consumers. The reduced value-added tax rate of seven percent should only be cut for food ...
