Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Labor Supply of Mothers: The Role of Time Discounting

Calculating Joint Confidence Bands for Impulse Response Functions Using Highest Density Regions

This paper proposes a new non-parametric method of constructing joint confidence bands for impulse response functions of vector autoregressive models. The estimation uncertainty is captured by means of bootstrapping and the highest density region (HDR) approach is used to construct the bands. A Monte Carlo comparison of the HDR bands with existing alternatives shows that the former are competitive...

Binary Choice Belief Elicitation: An Adaptively Optimal Design

Work Incentives in Europe

An Integrated Approach for Top-Corrected Ginis

Household survey data provide a rich information set on income, household context and demographic variables, but tend to under report incomes at the very top of the distribution. Tax record data offer more precise information on top incomes at the expense of household context details and incomes of non-filers at the bottom of the distribution. We combine the benefits of the two data sources and...

Don't Stop Me Now: The Impact of Credit Market Segmentation on Firms' Financing Constraints

Oil Prices, Terms of Trade and Optimal Monetary Policy

A Search and Matching Approach to Business-Cycle Migration in the Euro Area

Employment Effects and the Pension System: Evidence from a Cohort Based Reform

In this paper we exploit a cohort specific pension reform to estimate the causal employment effect of changes in the financial incentives to retire. In particular we analyze the effect of the introduction of pension deductions for early retirement on female employment. For the empirical analysis we use high-quality administrative data from the German Federal Pension Insurance (VSKT) and find...

Pension, Frictions and Poverty: Structural Evidence on the Consequences of Pension Reforms

After introducing obligatory and unfunded PAYG pension plans in the 19th and early 20th century, many Western countries nowadays struggle to keep up generosity. By way of illustration, US, UK, Italy and Germany all were pressured towards upward-shifting their regular retirement age by low fertility and high life-expectancy. In the presence of rationed labor markets, these reforms cannot take full...

The Effect of Relative Wealth on Pro-Social Behavior in Markets

The Signalling Role of Fiscal Austerity

I build a model where creditworthy countries use fiscal austerity to communicate their ability to repay sovereign debt. I show that the signalling channel is active only for high levels of asymmetric information. The model generates ceteris paribus a negative association between the amount of public information (provided by the rating agencies) and fiscal tightness. Informed by the model...

Risk and Uncertainty in Sovereign Debt Markets

We assess the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and risk aversion and their role for the pricing of sovereign debt. A theoretical model of sovereign default is used to tell apart the effects of risk aversion and uncertainty for bond prices. We find that investors' risk aversion is positively affected by an increase in uncertainty, indicating toward uncertainty constituting a root...

Increased Instruction Hours and the Widening Gap in Student Performance

Do increased instruction hours improve the performance of all students? Using PISA scores of students in ninth grade, we analyse the effect of a German education reform that increased weekly instruction hours by two hours (6.5 percent) overalmost five years. In the additional time, students are taught new learning content. On average, the reform improves student performance. However, treatment...

The Role of Time Preferences in Educational Decision Making

Insurance and Solidarity

Inference of Choice Sets in Grocery Retailing

Identifying Uncertainty Shocks Using the Price of Gold

We propose a new instrument to identify the impact of uncertainty shocks in a SVAR model with external instruments. We construct the instrument for uncertainty shocks by exploiting variations in the price of gold around selected events. The events capture periods of changes in uncertainty unrelated to other macroeconomic shocks. The variations in the price of gold around such events provide a...

The Battle for Redistribution: Why Germany Is Becoming More Unequal

Deindustrialization and the Polarization of Household Incomes: The Example of Urban Agglomerations in Germany