Insurance coverage in the developing world is expanding rapidly. As recently as 2005, only a small number of commercial insurers offered insurance products that specifically targeted low-income people (‘microinsurance’). Seven years later, in 2012, more than half of the world’s 50 largest insurance companies were involved in microinsurance. International donor organizations, which identified the promotion ...
Do WTO commitments reduce the risk of trade policy reversals? To address this question, we rely on the theoretical model of varying cooperative tariffs by Bagwell and Staiger (1990) to specify our empirical model for the probability of a tariff increase. We then study how WTO tariff commitments affect this probability. We estimate our model using a database of WTO bound tariffs that we built for all ...
This study analyzes the distributional effects of a defined pension benefit system under heterogeneous life expectancies. For this purpose, we propose a methodology that quantifies life expectancy-based regressive redistribution using a life expectancy-adjusted benchmark scenario. This methodology is combined with a structural life-cycle model of labor supply, retirement and consumption decisions...
Last Friday, twelve junior scientists received their certificates at the 2014 Commencement Ceremony of the Graduate Center at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin). They were congratulated by the Dean of DIW Graduate Center, Helmut Lütkepohl, the Executive Board of the DIW Berlin, as well as Matthias Kleiner, President of the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft. In his speech, Mr. Kleiner emphasized ...
In recent years, almost all children below school age in Western industrialized countries have some experience of attending day care institutions. However, the age at which children enter day care and therefore the overall time spent in day carevaries substantially. We investigate the potential impact of later day care entry on the social and emotional behaviour of children, one important aspect of ...
