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Report
Abstract: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa - the BRICS - show high overall economic growth rates by international standards. Even during the recent economic crisis, most BRICS countries still recorded above-average growth. This development has benefited German foreign trade in particular. This applies especially to automotive and mechanical engineering. However, this geographical reorientation ...
22.08.2012
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SOEPpapers 466 / 2012
In order to encourage people to take out voluntary private pensions to supplement decreasing statutory provisions Germany introduced the so-called Riester pensions. The complex design of the new product might have created entry barriers into the market helping to explain the slow adaption path in the eligible population until today. Existing empirical evidence has not properly taken into account the ...
2012| Bettina Lamla
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SOEPpapers 467 / 2012
This paper studies the effect of parenthood timing on future wages. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we employ an instrumental variable approach to identify the causal effect of delaying parenthood on wages of mothers and fathers. Consistent with previous studies, we provide evidence for a positive delaying effect on wages. We further study the underlying mechanisms of the wage ...
2012| Michael Kind, Jan Kleibrink
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SOEPpapers 468 / 2012
This paper shows that within-country happiness inequality has fallen in the majority of countries that have experienced positive income growth over the last forty years, in particular in developed countries. This new stylized fact comes as an addition to the Easterlin paradox, which states that the time trend in average happiness is flat during episodes of long-run income growth. This mean-preserving ...
2012| Andrew E. Clark, Sarah Flèche, Claudia Senik
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SOEPpapers 464 / 2012
This paper presents and compares trends in income inequality in Switzerland and Germany from 2000 to 2009 using harmonized data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and the Swiss Household Panel (SHP). Whereas in Germany inequality has increased substantially during this period, in Switzerland inequality in market incomes has increased onlymarginally and inequality in disposable incomes has decreased ...
2012| Markus M. Grabka, Ursina Kuhn
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SOEPpapers 462 / 2012
We estimate the size of inheritance and gift flows in Germany for selected years over the last century, applying the methodology used by Piketty (2011) for France and combining national accounts, tax statistics and survey data (mainly the German Socio-Economic Panel, SOEP). The data clearly supports the finding of a U-shaped evolution. The annual flow of inheritance and gifts was almost 15% of national ...
2012| Christoph Schinke
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SOEPpapers 463 / 2012
The SOEP Group currently is preparing in addition to increasing the size of the core SOEP, to establish a new Innovation Sample (SOEP-IS). This will be established for the period 2012 to 2017 (with a cumulative number of presumably N=5,000 households). Now, in the year 2012, a new subsample is being added for SOEP IS that will also replace the previous SOEP pretest sample. Starting with the 2013 survey, ...
2012| David Richter, Jürgen Schupp
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DIW Discussion Papers 1236 / 2012
Over the past decade, research explaining cross country income differences has increasingly pointed to the dominant role of total factor productivity (TFP) gaps as opposed to factor accumulation. Nevertheless, it is a widely held belief that a country's ability to absorb and implement technologies is tied to its human capital. In this paper, we implement this idea in a novel specification and explore ...
2012| Areendam Chanda, Beatrice Farkas
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DIW Discussion Papers 1234 / 2012
Microsimulation methods and models of labor market decisions have attracted a lot of attention as an approach to the assessment of consequences of family related policies in the area of labor market and fertility. We set these models in the context of relevant demographic theories and present them from the point of view of their potential as tool to guide effective policy making with the aim to reconcile ...
2012| Anna Kurowska, Michal Myck, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1235 / 2012
It is emphasized that the shocks in structural vector autoregressions are only identified up to sign and it is pointed out that this feature can result in very misleading confidence intervals for impulse responses if simulation methods such as Bayesian or bootstrap methods are used. The confidence intervals heavily depend on which variable is used for fixing the sign of the initial responses. In particular, ...
2012| Helmut Lütkepohl