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SOEP Wave Report 2013

The SOEP’s 2013 Wave Report has just been published. It provides an overview of the SOEP’s activities in 2013, a year filled with numerous activities marking the SOEP’s thirtieth survey wave. These included a timeline series tracing the development of the SOEP survey and life in Germany in the context of broader global events, the SOEP Anniversary Colloquium on Happiness Research, ...

Daniel Huppmann defended his Dissertation

Daniel Huppmann, doctoral student at the DIW Graduate Center since October 2011 and Research Associate in the department of Energy Transportation Environment since October 2012, successfully defended his dissertation Strategic Behaviour in Energy Markets in June 2014 at TU Berlin. The dissertation investigates several topics from energy economics where market power and strategic behaviour plays an ...

Transferability of Human Capital and Immigrant Assimilation: An Analysis for Germany

This paper investigates the transferability of human capital across countries and the contribution of imperfect human capital portability to the explanation of the immigrant-native wage gap. Using data for West Germany, our results reveal that, overall, education and in particular labor market experience accumulated in the home countries of the immigrants receive signifiantly lower returns than human ...

Performance Appraisals and Job Satisfaction

Formal performance appraisals (PA) are one of the most important human resource management practices in companies. In this paper, we focus on the reaction of employees to these performance assessments. In particular, we investigate the effect between the incidence of being formally evaluated by a supervisor and job and income satisfaction. Building on a representative, longitudinal sample of more ...

Macro News and Stock Returns in the Euro Area: A VAR-GARCH-in-Mean Analysis

This paper analyses the effects of newspaper coverage of macro news on stock returns in eight countries belonging to the euro area (Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain) using daily data for the period 1994-2013. The econometric analysis is based on the estimation of a VAR-GARCH-in-mean model. The results can be summarised as follows. Positive (negative) news have significant ...

Better Competition Policy Significantly Improves Productivity Growth

Economists have long discussed the correlation between the quality of competition policies and a country's productivity growth. It is, however, very difficult to prove this connection, to determine its extent or to quantify it. Commissioned by the European Commission, a team of international researchers, led by DIW competition expert Tomaso Duso, has developed the first evaluation system to assess ...

An Evaluation of the Economization of European Merger Control

The role of merger control is to protect the interests of consumers over those of major corporations. To improve this protection, European merger control underwent comprehensive reforms in 2004. The aim was to increase the importance of economic principles in reaching verdicts. An empirical study indicates that the Commission is now making fewer mistakes since the reforms. However, prohibiting mergers, ...

The Role of Time Preferences in Educational Decision Making

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the role time preferences play in educational decision making. In the presentation, I introduce a dynamic structural life-cycle model in which a forward-looking decision maker makes periodical decisions between continuing schooling and exiting to the labour force. The strategy of the underlying paper is to solve and estimate two versions of this model, one...

Structural Vector Autoregressions with Markov Switching: Combining Conventional with Statistical Identification of Shocks

In structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) analysis a Markov regime switching (MS) property can be exploited to identify shocks if the reduced form error covariance matrix varies across regimes. Unfortunately, these shocks may not have a meaningful structural economic interpretation. It is discussed how statistical and conventional identifying information can be combined. The discussion is based on ...

SOEP Wave Report 2013