It is emphasized that the shocks in structural vector autoregressions are only identified up to sign and it is pointed out that this feature can result in very misleading confidence intervals for impulse responses if simulation methods such as Bayesian or bootstrap methods are used. The confidence intervals heavily depend on which variable is used for fixing the signs of the responses. In particular, ...
By using longitudinal data the relation between satisfaction with life and unemployment is analyzed in this study. Data used in this publication were made available by the German Socio Economic Panel Study (SOEP) at the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), Berlin. A period from 1998-2009 is evaluated. This publication has two goals. (1) To estimate the effects of voluntary and involuntary ...
This study investigates whether the expansion of day-care places for under-three-year-old children in East and West Germany from 2007 to 2011 has improved the subjective wellbeing for mothers and fathers with a youngest child in this age group. We extend existing cross-sectional country comparisons and single country policy evaluations by comparing regional variations over time in two different contexts ...
Abstract: This paper investigates the short-term effects of reducing the length of upper secondary school on students' personality traits using state-level high school reforms in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment. Starting in 2001, the number of years of the academic secondary school track (Gymnasium) was gradually reduced from nine to eight in most of Germany's federal states, leaving the...
Integrating large quantities of variable renewable electricity generation remains a political and operational challenge. One of the main obstacles in Europe to installing at least 200 GWs of power from variable renewable sources is how to deal with the insufficient network capacity and the congestion that will result from new flow patterns. We model the current methodology for controlling congestion ...
