The Interview with Prof. Dr. Christian von Hirschhausen is published in DIW Economic Bulletin 6/2015. It is available for Download as pdf document. More issues of DIW Economic Bulletin
Since early 2009, electricity and gas distribution in Germany has been subject to incentive regulation designed to ensure greater efficiency in electricity and gas grid operation. However, it remains to be seen how changes to the regulatory framework will affect the investment behavior of distribution system operators. Against this background, the present study empirically analyzes the investment activities ...
Grid optimization, capacity increases, and grid expansion all play a key role in the development of the German power generation system. Thanks to transmission system operators’ foresightedness with regard to grid planning, as well as generous financial incentives related to grid expansion, Germany’s energy transition has not been impeded by transmission congestion in the electricity grid to date. So ...
The topic of rising income inequality does not only gain in relevance since the two prominent reports by the OECD (Growing unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries, Paris 2008; Divided we stand—Why inequality keeps rising, Paris 2011) but rather since the financial crisis. So far there is only scarce empirical evidence–besides a rather broad literature dealing with the US–about the ...
Many migrations are temporary – a fact that has often been ignored in the economic literature on migration. Such omission may be serious in that expected migration temporariness can impart a distinct dynamic element to immigrants’ economic behavior, generating possible consequences for non-migrants in both home and host countries. In this paper we provide a thorough examination of the various aspects ...
We estimate the impact of a differential treatment of paid employees versus self-employed workers in a public health insurance system on the entry rate into entrepreneurship. In Germany, the public health insurance system is mandatory for most paid employees, but not for the self-employed, who usually buy private health insurance. Private health insurance contributions are relatively low for the young ...
Abstract: What began as a financial crisis in 2007/2008 quickly became a massive crisis of the real economy. We investigate the importance of the bank lending and firm borrowing channel in the transmission of shocks to trading returns of banks to real investment of firms. For the analysis we match individual firm and bank financial statements in Germany for the period of 2004-2010.
