The structures of the European project have been helping the continent overcome many effects of the current crisis. Nevertheless, these shocks have also pointed to shortcomings in its construction, and eurozone economic governance is still lagging behind in coordination of fiscal and structural policies and in terms of risk sharing. Such reforms are imperative to lessen the burden on monetary...
(joint with Peter Haan and Victoria Prowse) We show how taxes and three transfer programs—unemployment insurance, social assistance and disability benefits—affect the inequality of lifetime income, and we explore how well taxes and transfer programs mitigate lifetime income risk due to labor market frictions. Calculations based on income trajectories generated from a dynamic life...
We re-examine the common wisdom that cross-border mergers are the most effective merger strategy for firms facing powerful unions. In contrast, we obtain a domestic merger outcome whenever firms are sufficiently heterogeneous (in terms of productive efficiency and product differentiation). A domestic merger unfolds a “wage-unifying” effect which limits the union's ability to extract rents. When products ...
We revisit the alleged retirement consumption puzzle. According to the life-cycle theory, foreseeable income reductions such as those around retirement should not affect consumption. However, we first recall that given higher leisure endowments after retirement, the theory does predict a fall of total market consumption expenditures. In order not to mistake this predicted drop for a puzzle we focus ...
This paper investigates neighborhood peer effects on individual welfare using a combined IV and control function approach. The empirical analysis is based on panel data for the years 2007-2010 constructed by enriching the geo-referenced version of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) with aggregated zip code level-information. The results suggest that individual welfare use is positively correlated ...
The increase of the use of atomic power in some emerging economies, in particular South Korea and China, has revitalized a discussion regarding the availability of uranium resources. Despite the fact that global uranium resources are more than sufficient to supply reactor-related demand for the rest of the century, some voices in the nuclear community expect a supply shortage for the upcoming decades, ...
DIW Berlin study reveals decline in foreign-owned companies’ R&D spending, but increase in overall R&D expenditure due to domestic companies’ considerable investment – foreign-owned companies are investing more strongly in leading-edge technologies, and midsize foreign-owned companies recently raised their R&D expenditure Private companies’ overall R&D ...
Marcel Hebing successfully defended his dissertation at the University of Bamberg, Faculty of Social Sciences, Economics, and Business Administration, on May 17, 2016. In his dissertation entitled "A Metadata-Driven Approach to Panel Data Management and its Application in DDI on Rails," he presents a generic framework for the development of a metadata-driven infrastructure for panel studies developed ...
