The past few decades have seen a considerable increase in caesarean section rates, which have now reached unprecedented levels. Concerns have been raised about the possibility of medically unnecessary procedures having negative consequences for mothers and infants (WHO, 2015). The aim of this report is to show that a properly implemented hospital-level policy may be a powerful tool for reducing the ...
The past few decades have seen a significant increase in the C-section rates of many developed countries. How much have the rates increased in Italy and Germany, the subjects of your report? We focus primarily on Italy, but we also discuss Germany to some extent—and according to OECD statistics for the year 1990, C-section rates amounted to 15 percent in Germany and approximately 20 percent ...
We examine the consequences of compressing secondary schooling on students’ university enrollment. An unusual education reform in Germany reduced the length of academic high school while simultaneously increasing the instruction hours in the remaining years. Accordingly, students receive the same amount of schooling but over a shorter period of time, constituting an efficiency gain from an individual’s ...
Many advanced economies implemented labor market reforms over the past decades in order to encourage higher labor force participation rates. In this paper, we measure work incentives inherent in tax-benefit systems by computing Participation Tax Rates (PTRs) across the EU and subsequently identify the impact of these disperse PTRs on the probability of employment. We find that higher PTR-levels...
BAMS is a joint seminar by the DIW Berlin, the Hertie School of Governance, the HU Berlin and the WZB.
As panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) models can include several countries and variables in one system, they are well suited for global spillover analyses. However, PVARs require restrictions to ensure the feasibility of the estimation. The present paper uses a selection prior for a data-based restriction search. It introduces the stochastic search variable selection for PVAR models (SSVSP) as an alternative ...
We are happy to present our recent SOEPnewsletter 113, October 2016. We like to inform about the upcoming SOEP version 32 (data 1984-2015), to be released not later than December 15, 2016, news on the SOEP information system paneldata.org (and the documentation of SOEP v31 at data.soep.de) the changes at the LIS - Cross-national Data Center in Luxembourg the change of name of our research institute ...
