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Pension Incentives and Early Retirement

In this paper we exploit a cohort-specific pension reform to estimate the causal labour market effects of changes in the financial incentives to retire. In particular, we analyze the effects of the introduction of cohort-specific deductions for early retirement on female retirement, employment and unemployment. For the empirical analysis we use high-quality administrative data from the German pension ...

Entrepreneurial Spillovers over Space and Time

Entrepreneurship is a local and dynamic phenomenon. We jointly investigate spatial spillovers and time persistence of regional new business formation. Using panel data from all 402 German counties for 1996-2011, we estimate dynamic spatial panel models of business creation in the high-tech and manufacturing industries. We consider regions of different sizes and systematically search for the most suitable ...

Do Caseworkers Reduce Unemployment? Evidence from Unexpected Work Absences

Caseworkers are the primary human resource used by governments to match unemployed workers to jobs. This paper provides first estimates on the role of caseworkers in reducing the duration of unemployment spells, using register data from the Swiss UI. For identification, I exploit caseworker-time specific variation in unexpected work absences, which I show to be independent of job seeker...

Family Ownership: Does It Matter for Funding and Success of Corporate Innovations?

Using the Mannheim innovation panel, we investigate whether family firms have higher financial need and how this affects both innovation input and innovation outcomes such as firm or market novelties, or process innovation. Applying the CDM framework, we find that family firms are more likely to have a latent financial need for innovation, which means that they have innovation ideas which they have ...

Resource Curse Contagion in the Case of Yemen

This study analyses the economic developments in Yemen from the 1970s to today in the context of the resource curse hypothesis. After a brief survey of the resource curse literature, using empirical data, historical accounts, and political (economic) analyses, I confirm that post-reunification Yemen suffers from an intense oil curse. The curse is evidenced by low genuine savings rates, oil-dependency, ...

Is the German Retail Gasoline Market Competitive? A Spatial-Temporal Analysis Using Quantile Regression

We explore whether noncompetitive pricing prevails in Germany’s retail gasoline market by examining the influence of the crude oil price on the retail gasoline price, focusing specifically on how this influence varies according to the brand and to the degree of competition in the vicinity of the station. Our analysis identifies several factors other than cost—including the absence of nearby competitors ...

We Are Largely Responsible for Our Own Happiness

The Impact of Lengthening the School Day on Substance Abuse and Crime: Evidence from a German High School Reform

In the 2000s, a major educational reform in Germany reduced the academic high school duration by one year while keeping constant the total number of instructional hours before graduation. The instructional hours from the eliminated school year shifted to lower grade levels, which increased the time younger students spend at school. This study explores the impact of the reform on youth crime rates and ...

Access to SOEPlit - please use www.diw.de/soeplit

Our database SOEPlit had to be stored on different servers several times in the last months. This is why SOEPlit in the moment cannot be accessed by klicking the quicklink provided on most of our websites. We apologize for the trouble caused. Until we can fix the problem, please use the short URL http://www.diw.de/soeplit. This URL will forward to SOEPlit even if we have to change the web address ...

All We Need is Love? Trade-Adjustment, Inequality, and the Role of the Partner

We examine the distributional effect of Germany’s trade integration with China and Eastern Europe and show that there are considerable differences between the household level and the individual level impact. The trade shock increased inequality of individual earnings. At the household level, however, about 40% of this distributional effect is reduced by a simple insurance effect that occurs if partners ...