Benchmarking methods are widely used in the regulation of firms in network industries working under heterogeneous exogenous environments. In this paper we compare three recently developed estimators, namely conditional DEA (Daraio and Simar, 2005, 2007b), latent class SFA (Orea and Kumbhakar, 2004; Greene, 2005), and the StoNEZD approach (Johnson and Kuosmanen, 2011) by means of Monte Carlo simulation ...
In the file with generated longitudinal data on children (KIDLONG) in SOEP-Core v31.1 another correction had to be implemented: Some few data that only had been asked in the FiD study were missing.This applies to the variables KA06$$ (Activities for children below the age of 6) and KA16$$ (Activities for children aged 6 to 16).If you want to analyze these variables there are three ways to use the corrected ...
DIW Berlin conducted two studies on developments in energy supply – private utilities no more efficient than public utilities – consolidation in drinking water sector offers little benefit More and more cities and municipalities in Germany are once again taking the electricity, gas, and heating utilities into their own hands: between 2003 and 2012, the number of public utilities increased ...
In the 1990s, a number of municipalities started privatizing their energy utilities; in recent years, there has been an intensive debate about whether a paradigm shift has taken place since then. Cities and municipalities have considered putting the energy, water, gas and heat supply back into the hands of public companies; Berlin and Hamburg are two prominent examples. But is there really an overarching ...
The increase in municipal economic activity in the utilities sector frequently comes under scrutiny. It is presumed that public utilities have less incentive to provide efficient service than private companies. This could result in excessive costs and prices for end users. New microdata on German energy supply companies allow to conduct an empirical analysis for the whole of Germany for the first time. ...
Ms. Cullmann, in recent years many communities have been reacquiring previously privatized shares in energy companies. Does this point to a trend toward remunicipalization? We have created a new microdata set of German energy companies in order to analyze this question for the first time in Germany. Our empirical analysis shows that both the number as well as the turnover of public companies in the ...
We estimate economic incidence of social security contributions (SSC) on the basis of cross-sectional earnings distributions. The approach exploits discontinuities in earnings distributions at kinks in the budget set which are informative about tax incidence. Contrary to most research on SSC incidence, it does not rely on policy reforms, panel data, or hours information. When the location of kinks ...
