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Annual Report 2014

2014 brought many exciting economic and sociopolitical questions to the forefront of DIW Berlin’s research: How can we respond to the challenges currently facing Europe and the euro? How do we evaluate the effects of German reunification, 25 years after the wall came down? And how can we ensure equal opportunities for men and women? To learn more about these issues, as well DIW Berlin’s ...

How Natural Disasters Can Affect Environmental Concerns, Risk Aversion, and Even Politics: Evidence from Fukushima and Three European Countries

We study the impact of the Fukushima disaster on environmental concerns, well-being, risk aversion, and political preferences in Germany, Switzerland, and the UK. In these countries, overall life satisfaction did not significantly decrease, but the disaster significantly increased environmental concerns among Germans. One underlying mechanism likely operated through the perceived risk of a similar ...

Linkages between the US and European Stock Markets: A Fractional Cointegration Approach

This paper analyses the long-memory properties of US and European stock indices, as well as their linkages, using fractional integration and fractional cointegration techniques. These methods are more general and have higher power than the standard ones usually employed in the literature. The empirical evidence based on them suggests the presence of unit roots in both the S&P 500 Index and the Euro ...

Cooperation or Competition? A Field Experiment on Non-Monetary Learning Incentives

We assess the effect of two antithetic non-monetary incentive schemes based on grading rules on students’ effort, using experimental data. We randomly assigned students to a tournament scheme that fosters competition between paired up students, a cooperative scheme that promotes information sharing and collaboration between students and a baseline treatment in which students can neither compete nor ...

Statistical Problems and Solutions in Onomastic Research - Exemplified by a Comparison of Given Name Distributions in Germany throughout the 20th Century

Das Sozio-oekonomische Panel (SOEP) bietet die seltene Gelegenheit, Vergabemuster von Vornamen im Zeitraum seit 1900 bis heute mit repräsentativen Umfragedaten zu untersuchen. Die Umfrage umfasst mehr als 50.000 Teilnehmer. Der Beitrag gibt einen Überblick über typische Verteilungen von Vornamen in Deutschland und deren Entwicklungen über die Zeit. Zunächst werden Vorteile, Einschränkungen und Grenzen ...

Unbundling the Incumbent: Evidence from UK Broadband

We consider the impact of a regulatory process forcing an incumbent telecom operator to make its local broadband network available to other companies (local loop unbundling, or LLU). Entrants are then able to upgrade their individual lines and offer Internet services directly to customers. Employing a very detailed data set covering the whole of the United Kingdom, we find that, over the course of ...

25 years of German Unity: Political orientations still different in East Germany and West Germany

Discrepancies primarily in party affiliation and voter turnout –attitudes toward the welfare state are converging – support for the Left Party remains marginal in the West Twenty-five years after reunification, East and West Germans continue to show clear differences in their political preferences. This is the result of an analysis carried out by the German Institute for Economic Research ...

Political Culture Still Divided 25 Years after Reunification?

In 1990, during reunification, West German democratic institutions and the existing political party system were expanded to the East German states. Even after 25 years, the people of eastern and western Germany still differ in their political engagement and attitudes. However, these differences do not apply across the board by any means. A detailed analysis of survey data from the Socio-Economic Panel ...

Similar Levels of Political Interest between East and West, Notable Differences in Turnout: Six Questions to Martin Kroh

"Similar Levels of Political Interest between East and West, Notable Differences in Turnout": Six Questions to Martin Kroh

Professor Kroh, on October 3, 1990, the German Democratic Republic acceded to the Federal Republic of Germany. Have differences between the political cultures in eastern and western Germany persisted or has some convergence been observed here? There is no clear answer to this question. It really depends on what area you are looking at. The interview with Martin Kroh is published in DIW Economic Bulletin ...