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Report
by Franziska Holz, Hanna Brauers and Thorsten Roobeek
Two years ago, DIW Berlin introduced “Familienarbeitszeit”, which offers wage replacement for families in which both partners decide to take on reduced full-time employment (working hours amount¬ing to roughly 80 percent of a full-time job, henceforth referred to as “three-quarters employment”). This study investigates ...
25.11.2015
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Interview
Dr. Holz, what’s the link between the earthquakes that have occurred in the Netherlands and natural gas production?
In the past two or three years, the Netherlands has experienced a very high number of increasingly powerful earthquakes which have also had an impact on property. People are concerned that these earthquakes are triggered by Dutch natural gas extraction destabilizing geological ...
25.11.2015
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DIW Discussion Papers 1525 / 2015
This paper investigates the impact of peer observation on the consumption decisions of rural households in Thailand using a lab-in-the-field experiment. We find that those groups that observe each other show lower within group standard deviation in their decisions. Thus, we find evidence for conformity. Further, we find that individual's consumption choice is influenced by the group choice controlling ...
2015| Antonia Grohmann, Sahra Sakha
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DIW Discussion Papers 1520 / 2015
Informal care by close family members is the main pillar of most longterm care systems. However, due to demographic ageing the need for long-term care is expected to increase while the informal care potential is expected to decline. From a budgetary perspective, informal care is often viewed as a cost-saving alternative to subsidized formal care. This view, however neglects that many family carers ...
2015| Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan, Thorben Korfhage
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DIW Roundup 87 / 2015
Climate policy consistent with the 2°C target needs to install mechanisms that leave most current coal reserves unburned. Demand-side policies have been argued to be prone to adverse carbon leakage and “green paradox” effects. A growing strain of literature argues in favor of supply-side policies in order to curb future coal consumption. Various concepts with analogies in other sectors are currently ...
2015| Kim Collins, Roman Mendelevitch
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SOEPpapers 810 / 2015
It is still widely debated how non-cognitive skills can be affected by policy intervention. For example, universal music education programs are becoming increasingly popular among policy makers in Germany and other developed countries. These are intended to give children from poor families the opportunity to learn a musical instrument. Moreover, policymakers present these programs as innovative policies ...
2015| Adrian Hille
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SOEPpapers 809 / 2015
This paper argues for the central role of risk aversion in shaping political ideology. We develop a political economy model, which makes explicit the link between risk aversion, the labor market, government policy, and ideology. Our model distinguishes the effects of risk aversion from unemployment risk and our evidence sheds light on debates over explanations for the welfare state. We test our model ...
2015| Matthew Dimick, Daniel Stegmueller
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DIW Discussion Papers 1533 / 2015
Open access means that research outputs, such as articles and data, are free of restrictions on access and free of restrictions on use. In the light of recent market developments in academic publishing, we argue in this essay that the discourse about open access must include a discussion about research infrastructure and innovation in academic publishing.
2015| Benedikt Fecher, Gert G. Wagner
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SOEPpapers 806 / 2015
The affordability of housing has become a major topic of discussion in Germany among both social scientists and the public at large. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we provide rent-income ratios over more than two decades and show how they change with households’ disposable needs-adjusted income. We find a substantial increase in the ratios over the 1990s. In the decade that ...
2015| Teresa Backhaus, Kathrin Gebers, Carsten Schröder
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SOEPpapers 807 / 2015
This study examined the long-standing question of whether a person’s position among siblings has a lasting impact on that person’s life course. Empirical research on the relation between birth order and intelligence has convincingly documented that performances on psychometric intelligence tests decline slightly from firstborns to laterborns. By contrast, the search for birth-order effects on personality ...
2015| Julia M. Rohrer, Boris Egloff, Stefan C. Schmukle