Christian Leßmann, Dresden University of Technology, Germany
In the modern welfare state, people who cannot make a living usually receive financial assistance from public funds. Accordingly, the so-called social work norm against living off other people is violated, which may be the reason why the unemployed are so unhappy. If so, however, labour market concepts based on the notion of promoting low-paid jobs that are subsidised if necessary with additional payments ...
Using SOEP panel data and difference-in-differences methods, this study is the first to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of four different health care cost containment measures within an integrated framework. The four measures investigated were introduced in Germany in 1997 to reduce moral hazard and public health expenditures in the market for convalescent care. Doubling the daily copayments ...
We investigate convergence in European price level, unit labour cost, income and productivity data over the period of 1960-2006 using the non-linear time-varying coefficients factor model proposed by Philips and Sul (2007 Econometrica 75:1771-1855). This approach is extremely flexible in order to model a large number of transition paths to convergence. We find regional clusters in consumer price level ...
This paper investigates the association between maternal life satisfaction and the developmental functioning of 2-3-year-old children as well as the socio-emotional behavior of 5-6-year-old children. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which allows us to control for a rich set of child and parental characteristics and to use the mother's life satisfaction before the birth ...
Many Colombians are confronted with the ongoing conflict that influences their decision making in everyday life, including their behavior in labor markets. This study focuses on the impact of violent conflict on self-employment, enlarging the usual determinants with a set of conflict variables. In order to estimate the effect of conflict on self-employment, we employ fixed effects estimation. Three ...
In this paper, we discuss the relationship between infrastructure regulation and investment in light of the emerging "security of supply" debate. We approach the subjectby surveying the literature of the past two decades, especially examining the interactions among restructuring, regulation, and investment. The empirical section of this paper relies on case studies of the relationship between the regulatory ...
Jan Marcus and Daniel Kemptner, both DIW Berlin Graduate CenterThis is the first study investigating the causal effect of maternal education on child's health behavior and schooling outcomes in Germany. Our paper adds to the existing literature on intergenerational transfers in various ways. We apply a new instrumental variables approach which has not yet been used in the intergenerational context...
