Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Financial Development and Employment

This paper studies the association between a country's level of financial development and firms' employment growth. We employ an incomplete contract model for evaluating this association. The model proposes that a high level of financial development affects the employment of firms with low managerial capital negatively, while firms with high managerial capital benefit from a more developed...

Productivity in German Manufacturing Firms: Does Fixed-Term Employment Matter?

A growing proportion of employees are working under fixed-term contracts. This paper empirically analyzes whether this strategy actually improves firm productivity. To this end, a largedata set of German manufacturing firms and various panel data models are used in order to reveal the expected non-linear effect. Thereby the analysis also takes into account distortions that may result from...

The Impact of Extreme Weather Events on Child Health: Evidence from Mongolia

We provide new evidence on the impact of one severe weather shock on child height in Mongolia. Our focus is on the extremely harsh winter - locally referred to as dzud - of 2009/10, which caused more than 23 percent of the national livestock to perish. This resulted in a food insecurity situation for many Mongolian households. Our analysis identifies causal effects by exploiting exogenous...

Do Women Favor In-group Competition? Evidence From an Incentivized Choice Experiment

Incentives of Commercial Banks to Finance Energy Efficiency

This paper investigates the incentives of commercial banks for providing energy efficiency lending. Interviews were conducted with banks to model their decision making related to energy efficiency. The modelling shows the trade-off banks face between initial transaction cost and benefits from portfolio diversification. According to these findings, two aspects are important to upscale energy...

Personality Traits and Preferences for College Education

Displacement and Child Health Outcomes: Evidence from Colombia's DHS 2010

Estimating the Impact of Alternative Multiple Imputation Methods on Longitudinal Wealth Data

Statistical Analysis in surveys is often facing missing data. As case-wise deletion and single imputation prove to have undesired properties, multiple imputation remains as a measure to handle this problem. In a longitudinal study, where for some missing values past or future data points might be available, the question arises how to successfully transform this advantage into better imputation...

Die wirtschaftlichen Chancen einer klugen Energiewende

Explaining Rates of Return Differences across Industries: The Roles of Risk, Intangible Capital and the (Lack of) Competition

Numerous empirical studies document persistent inter-sectoral differences in the rate of return on capital. From a theoretical perspective, persistent rate of return differences indicate inefficiency and point to a lack of competition. However, such an interpretation is valid only if returns are accurately measured. Maybe it is a lack of measurement rather than a lack of competition which is...

Developing a Task-Based Approach for the Measurement of Human Resources in Knowledge-Based Capital

Research on the role of Knowledge-Based Capital (KBC) as a key driver of firm performance, especially as a complementary and enabling asset for other investments, has burgeoned in recent years and has contributed to making significant progress in the measurement of resources devoted by firms to KBC. The expenditure based approach of Corrado,Hulten and Sichel (2005, 2009, hereafter CHS) has been...

Output and Productivity Growth in the Healthcare Sector: A Study of Four European Countries

This paper attempts to measure output and productivity growth in the health care sector for four European countries, Germany, Hungary, Spain and the UK. It derives comparable costs weighted activity indexes for hospital outputs, shows the impact of quality adjustments using in-hospital mortality rates and derives output indices for some nonhospital output. Overall output growth is highest in the...

Wealth Distribution and Wealth Mobility in U.S.-German Comparison

Fiscal Federalism and Tax Enforcement

Understanding the Effect of Retirement on Health Using Regression Discontinuity Design

Race to the Debt Trap? Spatial Econometric Evidence on Debt in German Municipalities

Religious Heterogeneity and Fiscal Policy: Evidence from German Reunification

On the Political Economy of Tax Revenue Forecasts: Evidence from OECD Countries

The Introduction of Disincentives for Early Retirement and Its Effect on Labor Market Participation

Analyzing Economic Policies that Affect Supply and Demand: A Structural Model of Productivity, Labor Supply and Rationing