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European climate protection goals can be reached without nuclear power

Photovoltaics and wind power can replace nuclear power – DIW Berlin’s energy experts maintain that a nuclear power renaissance is neither sensible nor necessary – financing for the decommissioning of nuclear power plants and the search for a final storage should be secured through public funds Europe’s climate protection goals will not be endangered if existing nuclear power ...

Time-Varying VARs and FAVARs. A practical introduction.

International Portfolio Flows and Exchange Rate Volatility for Emerging Markets

This paper investigates the effects of equity and bond portfolio inflows on exchange rate volatility, using monthly bilateral data for the US vis-a-vis eight Asian developing and emerging countries (India, Indonesia, South Korea, Pakistan, Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines, and Taiwan) over the period 1993:01-2012:11, and estimating a time-varying transition probability Markov-switching model. We ...

RESOURCES team presents research results at the BMBF conference „Economics of Climate Change“

DIW Berlin and Universität Potsdam have carried out the research project “RESOURCES – Climate policies in the strategic markets of coal, oil, natural gas” since 2012 (until end 2015). The project is part of the funding program “Economics of Climate Change” of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research which aims at fostering the discipline of climate economics ...

Productivity Growth, Investment, and Secular Stagnation

In many advanced economies, the economic recovery from the financial crisis has been sluggish. In light of these developments, it has been argued by various economists that economic growth per capita has already been on a downward trend since the 1980s. Studies suggest that this is largely due to low productivity growth. While factors of production such as labor and capital are being used more productively ...

Does Better, Cheaper Day Care Make for More Satisfied Parents?

by Georg F. Camehl, Juliane F. Stahl, Pia S. Schober and C. Katharina Spieß Following the major expansion of day care provision in Germany in recent years, the quality of these programs has increasingly also been the subject of public debate. When evaluating the quality of German day care centers, experts have frequently concluded that there is considerable room for improvement. Apart from consider¬ing ...

Costs of "Family Working-Time Benefits Model" (Familienarbeitszeit) Manageable in the Short Term: Six Questions to Kai-Uwe Müller

Mr. Müller, what is the current state of the work-life balance in Germany? Since the introduction of Elterngeld, the situation has improved. Especially the expansion of subsidized day-care for small children has contributed to this development. On the other hand, there’s still a relatively widespread dissatisfaction with the work-life balance. Mothers would like to participate more in the ...

2015 User Survey underway: We want to hear from you!

To improve our SOEP user services, we are again conducting a user survey up to December 18. We are very interested in both the fresh viewpoints of new SOEP users and the insights of our longtime users. A focus of our work this year is on making it easier to understand how to use secondary data. Your feedback and suggestions are very important to us: Only you may see possibilities for improvement that ...

Integrating the refugees will have a positive effect on the economy in the long run

DIW economists simulate various scenarios based on different assumptions – in every projected scenario, investment pays off in the longer term – successful integration will increase per capita income of Germany’s current population The recent influx of refugees has created enormous challenges for politicians and society at large - but according to a simulation conducted by economists ...

The "Family Working-Time Benefits Model" (Familienarbeitszeit): Giving Mothers More Time for Work, Giving Fathers More Time for Family

Two years ago, DIW Berlin introduced “Familienarbeitszeit”, which offers wage replacement for families in which both partners decide to take on reduced full-time employment (working hours amount¬ing to roughly 80 percent of a full-time job, henceforth referred to as “three-quarters employment”). This study investigates further developments of this model: Apart from a more generous wage replacement ...