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 ...
Previous research on unemployment and life satisfaction has focused on the effects of unemployment on individuals but neglected the effects on their partners. In the present study, we used dyadic multilevel models to analyze longitudinal data from 2,973 couples selected from a German representative panel study to examine the effects of unemployment on life satisfaction in couples over several years. ...
Long-run restrictions have been used extensively for identifying structural shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. Such restrictions are typically just-identifying but can be checked by utilizing changes in volatility. This paper reviews and contrasts the volatility models that have been used for this purpose. Three main approaches have been used, exogenously generated changes in the unconditional ...
Using multilevel models on the German Socio‐Economic Panel Study this paper shows that disadvantaged young adults (16‐35 years old) are more affected by the business cycle than their similarly educated counterparts from more advantaged backgrounds. We propose that a disadvantaged background lowers desirability on the labour market, which matters more to employers as the labour market tightens. When ...
This paper experimentally investigates the nature of image concerns in gift giving. For this, we test variants of dictator and impunity games where the influences of social preferences on behavior are kept constant across all games. Givers maximize material payoffs by pretending to be fair when receivers do not know the actual surplus size, implying that portraying an outward appearance of norm compliance ...
