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DIW Discussion Papers 660 / 2007
We analyse how money as a store of value affects the decisions of a representative household under diversifiable and non-diversifiable risks given that the central bank successfully stabilizes the rate of inflation at a low level. Assuming exponential utility allows us to derive an explicit relationship between optimal money holdings, the household's desire to tilt, smooth and stabilize consumption ...
2007| Ingrid Größl, Ulrich Fritsche
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DIW Discussion Papers 649 / 2006
In this paper we analyze the impact of the economic reforms implemented in 1980s and of the Custom Union Agreement of 1996 on the intra-industry trade in Turkey. Using the panel data for 15 trading partners of Turkey and the sample period 1970-2005, we record the positive impact of both reforms with the former reforms exercising stronger influence on the intra-industry trade measured either by the ...
2006| Sule Akkoyunlu, Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Boriss Siliverstovs
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DIW Discussion Papers 647 / 2006
I construct a new dataset with financial and housing wealth in 16 countries and investigate the effect of wealth on consumption. The baseline estimation method based on the sluggishness of consumption growth implies that the long-run marginal propensity to consume out of total wealth averaged across countries is 5 cents. I find substantial heterogeneity in the wealth effects: the individual country ...
2006| Jiri Slacalek
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DIW Discussion Papers 631 / 2006
In this paper, the process of productivity convergence is investigated for the enlarged European Union using regional (NUTS-2) data. The Solow model extended by human capital is employed as a workhorse. Alternative strategies are proposed to control for spatial effects. All specifications confirm the presence of convergence with an annual speed between 3 and 3.5 percent towards regional steady states. ...
2006| Hans-Friedrich Eckey, Christian Dreger, Matthias Türck
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DIW Discussion Papers 624 / 2006
Foreign exchange rate expectations play a central role in virtually all monetary models for the open economy. Therefore, it is extremely important to gain empirical insights into the expectations formation process. In this paper, we use a unique disaggregated data set to model the expectations of the Yen/USD exchange rate of about 50 leading foreign exchange rate professionals. The survey includes ...
2006| Christian Dreger, Georg Stadtmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 622 / 2006
In this paper we examine the interactions between the remittances of the Turkish workers in Germany and the output both in Turkey and in Germany. In our analysis we use the new data set provided by the German monetary authorities, which was never before employed in the literature and which we consider as a more reliable source than the data sets used in the other studies. We show that the remittances ...
2006| Sule Akkoyunlu, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 615 / 2006
We estimate the sticky information Phillips curve model of Mankiw and Reis (2002) using survey expectations of professional forecasters from four major European economies. Our estimates imply that inflation expectations in France, Germany and the United Kingdom are updated about once a year, in Italy about once each six months.
2006| Jörg Döpke, Jonas Dovern, Ulrich Fritsche, Jiri Slacalek
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DIW Discussion Papers 613 / 2006
In the development literature, there exists no systematic study of external borrowing in post-conflict countries. We address this gap by analyzing statistical and case study evidence from three African countries. We find that many war-affected countries face rising debt arrears and deteriorating relations with creditors. Rebuilding trust between lenders and borrowers is hence a crucial but often slow ...
2006| Patricia Alvarez-Plata, Tilman Brück
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DIW Discussion Papers 599 / 2006
In this study we have addressed the relationship between the stock market, the measure of real economic activity (represented by the real GDP), the economic sentiment indicator, and real interest rate for the five European countries: Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the UK. We find that even when accounting for expectations, represented by the economic sentiment indicator, the stock market ...
2006| Boriss Siliverstovs, Manh Ha Duong
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DIW Discussion Papers 598 / 2006
This paper suggests a novel approach to pre-selection of the component series of the diffusion index based on their individual forecasting performance. It is shown that this targeted selection allows substantially improving the forecasting ability compared to the diffusion index models that are based on the largest available dataset.
2006| Boriss Siliverstovs, Konstantin A. Kholodilin