What began as a financial crisis in the United States in 2007–2008 quickly evolved into a massive crisis of the global real economy. We investigate the importance of the bank lending and firm borrowing channel in the international transmission of bank distress to the real economy - in particular, to real investment and labor employment by nonfinancial firms. We analyze whether and to what extent firms ...
Empirical evidence indicates that high oil price volatility has a dampening effect on output in countries that import commodities. Many countries, however, gain important revenuesfrom commodity exports. This paper investigates the output effects of commodity price volatility in commodity exporting countries accounting for both oil and non-oil commodities. To that aim, we construct country specific ...
In-work support through the tax-benefit system has proved to be an effective way of increasing labour supply of lone mothers and first earners in couples in a number of OECD countries. At the same time these instruments usually create negative employment incentives for secondary earners. This in turn reduces the potential of in-work support to address the joint objectives of higher employment and lower ...
This paper aims to verify results of the innovative study on gender identity for the USA by Bertrand et al. (2015) for Germany. They found that women who would earn more than their husbands distort their labor market outcome in order not to violate traditional gender identity norms. Using data from the German Socio-economic Panel Study we also find that the distribution of the share of income earned ...
In many countries, important features of municipal government (such as the electoral system, mayors' salaries, and the number of councillors) depend on whether the municipality is above or below arbitrary population thresholds. Several papers have used a regression discontinuity design (RDD) to measure the effects of these threshold-based policies on political and economic outcomes. Using evidence ...
The increase in divorce rates over the past decades challenges the traditional image of the two-parent family. Yet, this traditional view of the family remains most often central to political socialization research. Therefore, this study investigates how parental separation affects the political socialization process, by comparing adults who did and did not experience parental separation while...
One out of every three workers would prefer to work from home, but only one out of every eight actually does – Germany’s proportion of home workers lags behind that of other European countries – home workers are more satisfied with their jobs – reconciling career and family is not the primary motive In Germany, only twelve percent of all employees work primarily or even partially ...
As far as the share of individuals with a home office is concerned, Germany is below the EU average and lags considerably behind other countries such as France, the UK, or the Scandinavian countries. Only 12 percent of all employees in Germany work primarily or occasionally from home, although this would theoretically be possible in 40 percent of jobs. In most cases, an employee’s desire to work from ...
The majority of OECD member states promote companies’ research and development (R&D) activities by providing project funding. Recently, in many countries, tax incentives have also begun to play an increasingly important role. The present study examines the level of R&D support in 18 OECD countries and explores how efficient the system of funding actually is. The main findings show that in the majority ...