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"Private consumption will remain a powerful growth driver": Eight Questions to Simon Junker

Mr. Junker, what kind of growth should we expect for the German economy?  The German economy is expected to grow by 1.6 percent this year, which is a bit weaker than we had forecasted this past winter. This slight downward revision is primarily due to the fact that industry experienced a weak phase over the past six months, especially in the final quarter of 2015. The major reason for this was ...

Signals Sell: Designing a Product Line when Consumers Have Social Image Concerns

One important function of consumption is for consumers to show off their taste, virtue or wealth. While empirical observations suggest that producers take this into account, existing research has concentrated on analyzing the demand side. This paper investigates how a monopolist optimally designs its product line when consumers differ both in their taste for quality and their desire for a positive ...

Rules versus Human Beings, and the Mandate of the ECB

The actions by the European Central Bank (ECB) during the global and European crises have triggered a highly controversial debate, in particular in Germany, about the costs and benefits of the chosen policy path. The article reviews, compares, and evaluates the different arguments made in favor and against ECB policies around three key dimensions—the link of the policy path to price stability, financial ...

Exchange Rates and Macro News in Emerging Markets

This paper uses a VAR-GARCH(1,1) model to analyse mean and volatility spillovers between macro news (in the form of newspaper headlines) and the exchange rates vis-avis both the US dollar and the euro of the currencies of a group of emerging countries including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Indonesia, Korea, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, Thailand and Turkey over the period 02/1/2003-23/9/2014. The results ...

Open Source Electricity Model for Germany (ELMOD-DE)

This data documentation introduces to nodal dispatch models and the literature of the ELMOD model framework, which focuses on bottom-up electricity sector models with detailed spatial representation of the transmission system. The paper provides the technical description of ELMOD-DE, a nodal DC load flow model for the German electricity sector. In alignment with this paper, the described model, including ...

Personality and Marriage: Selection or Causal Effects?

Personality traits (also called noncognitive skills) are an important predictor for many economic outcomes and indicators of wellbeing, such as labor force participation, income, and health. While it is well established that personality changes during childhood and can be influenced by interventions, much less is known about whether personality is malleable during young adulthood. This is because...

Terminal Decline in Well-Being: The Role of Social Orientation

Well-being development at the end of life is often characterized by steep deteriorations, but individual differences in these terminal declines are substantial and not yet well understood. This study moved beyond the typical consideration of health predictors and explored the role of social orientation and engagement. To do so, we made use of social variables at the behavioral level (self-ratings of ...

EU Emissions Trading: Distinctive Behavior of Small Companies

The EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) is the cornerstone of the European Union’s climate policy and covers just under half of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions. More than ten years since the EU ETS was first introduced, there continues to be substantial research interest regarding its functioning and the behavior of participating companies. DIW Berlin conducted three econometric studies ...

"Transparency of emissions trading data leaves a lot to be desired": Six Questions to Aleksandar Zaklan

Dr. Zaklan, you have studied company behavior in the EU Emissions Trading System. What differences can be seen in how companies handle emissions allowances? Large companies participate more actively in emissions trading than smaller enterprises. We established this on the basis of older data. In a second study, we were able to show that for small installations, the way in which allowances are allocated ...

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