Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Which Outputs Are Relevant? Defining Technology Sets in Nonparametric Efficiency Analysis by Testing Restrictions

Liquidity Constraints and the Permanent Income Hypothesis: Pseudo Panel Estimation with German Consumption Survey Data

This paper empirically investigates the relevance of liquidity constraints and excess sensitivity in intertemporal household consumption. Using a pseudo panel that has been constructed on rich German consumption survey data, we estimate the consumption responses to permanent and transitory income shocks, as well as the presence of excess sensitivity to anticipated income changes. A switching...

Do Absolute Majorities Spend Less? Evidence from Germany

The number of parties in government is usually considered to increase spending. We show that this is not necessarily the case. Using a new method to detect close election outcomes in multi-party systems, we isolate truly exogenous variation in the type of government. With data from municipalities in the German state of Bavaria, we show in regression discontinuity-type estimations that absolute...

Liquidity Crises, Banking, and the Great Recession

Trade and the Environment: The Role of Firm Heterogeneity

This paper derives a new effect of trade liberalisation on the quality of the environment. We show that in the presence of heterogeneous firms the aggregate volume of emissions is influenced not only by the long-established scale effect, but also by a reallocation effect resulting from an increase in the relative size of more productive firms. We show how the relative importance of these effects,...

Estimating Heterogeneous Returns to Education in Germany via Conditional Second Moments

In this paper I investigate the causal returns to education for different educational groups in Germany by employing a new method by Klein and Vella (2010) that bases identification on the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity. Compared to IV methods, key advantages of this approach are unbiased estimates in the absence of instruments and parameter interpretation that is not bounded to local...

Wage Mobility in East and West Germany

An Electricity Market Model with Generation Capacity Investment under Uncertainty

This article presents an electricity dispatch model with endogenous electricity generation capacity expansion for Germany over the horizon 2035. The target is to quantify how fuel price uncertainty impacts investment incentives of thermal power plants. Results point to findings which are in line with general theory: Accounting for stochasticity increases investment levels overall and the...

How Do Taxes Affect Investment When Firms Face Financial Constraints?

This study uses a switching regression framework with known sample separation to analyze the effects of corporate income taxation on investment in case of binding and non-binding financial constraints. By employing two different sample splitting criteria, payout behavior and the ratio of liabilities to total assets, I show that the elasticity of capital to its user costs in an auto-distributed-lag...

Labor Supply of Mothers with Young Children: Validating a Structural Model Using a Natural Experiment

Electricity Generation and Transmission Capacity Expansion: An Application to the Central European Region

Responsive Adjustment of Feed-in Tariffs to Dynamic PV Technology Development

This paper reviews the adjustments of the feed-in tariff for new solar photovoltaics (PV) installations in Germany. As PV system prices declined rapidly over the last years, the German government implemented automatic mechanisms to adjust the support level for new installations in response to deployment volumes. This paper develops an analytic model to simulate weekly installations of PV systems ?...

Chinese Renewable Energy Technology Exports: The Role of Policy, Markets and Innovation

Strategic Behavior in the Crude Oil Market: One-Stage vs. Two-Stage Oligopoly Models

A New Model for Analyzing Renewable Energy Integration in Germany

An Electricity Market Model with Generation Capacity Expansion under Uncertainty

Why Do Firms Trade Carbon Emission Permits? Evidence from the European Emission Trading Scheme

Biochar to the Point: Special Talk

Financial Transaction Tax

Die wirtschaftlichen Chancen einer klugen Energiewende