Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Labor Supply under Working Hours Constraints: Assessing the Potential of a Family Working Time Benefit in Germany

Child Care Expansion and Mothers' Labor Supply: Is There a Causal Link?

Offset Credits in the EU Emissions Trading System: A Firm-Level Evaluation of Transaction Costs

Learning from Unrealized versus Realized Prices

Our market experiment investigates the extent to which traders learn from the price, differentiating between situations where orders are submitted before versus after the price has realized. When market participants have to submit their bids conditional on the price, they show a bias by reacting only to their private information and not to the hypothetical value of the price. In a sequential...

Preference for College and Educational Inequality: Do Students Lack Information? Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Monetary Policy and Defaults in the US

This paper studies one possible aggregate implication of the risk-taking channel of monetary policy. Previous work finds that banks respond to a monetary expansion by taking on more risk. One possible implication of this effect is that, by the law of large numbers, aggregate defaults increase. First, I use a simple model of defaults to suggest that, in general equilibrium, risk-taking may not...

Multiple-Item Risk Measures

Social Norms or Income Taxation - What Drives Couple's Labor Supply? Experimental Evidence

On the Incidence of Renewable Energy Subsidies into Land Prices: Evidence from Germany

When Is Foreign Exchange Intervention Effective? Evidence from 33 Countries

Job Matching on Connected Occupational and Regional Labor Markets

The efficiency of job matching on local labor markets is susceptible to the spillovers caused both by regional and occupational mobility. In the present paper, we use novel administrative German data on the number of matches, unemployed and vacancies in the local labor markets that vary by both region and occupational titles. We compare the fixed-effects estimation of the matching function on...

Peer Effects in Labor Supply Decisions of Mothers with Young Children

Introduction to the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) – Practice, Problems and Analytical Potentials of Longitudinal Household Surveys: Policy and Research Workshop

Expansion of Full-Day Child Care and Subjective Wellbeing of Parents: Interdependencies with Culture and Resources

Voting for Direct Democracy: Evidence from a Unique Popular Initiative in Bavaria

We analyze a constitutional change in the German State of Bavaria where citizens, not politicians, granted themselves more say in politics at the local level through a constitutional initiative at the state level. This institutional setting allows us to focus on revealed preferences for direct democracy and to identify factors which explain this preference. Empirical results suggests support for...

The Role of Capital Income for Top Income Shares in Germany

The disappearance of capital income from the income tax base in many countries poses a major challenge to the comparability of top income share series based on income tax statistics both over time and between countries. First, we extend the existing German series including capital gains to 2010. Second, we derive three homogeneous series by simulating legislative definitions of capital income...

Job Search Expectations

Overlapping Political Budget Cycles

We advance the literature on political budget cycles by testing for cycles in expenditures for elections in the legislative and the executive. Using municipal data, we can identify these cycles independently for the two branches, evaluate the effects of random overlaps, and account for general year effects. We find sizable and significant effects in expenditures before elections for the...

Tax Transfer Payments after Natural Disaster: A Diff-in-Diff Analysis of the 2002 Elbe Flood and Its Impact on Municipal Finances in Saxony

This paper explores the financial effectiveness of tax transfer payments after an unforeseeable natural destruction on the regions budget. The example is chosen from the 2002 flood in Saxony and damages in the municipalities. It was debated whether the flood relief fund was sufficient or even over compensating. We analyze what has changed in the debt level of the municipalities and calculate the...

Inequality and Defined Benefit Pensions When Life Expectancy Is Heterogeneous

In this paper, we analyze how income taxes, transfer programs and the pension system affect inequality in lifetime income. Importantly, we consider pre-retirement and post-retirement income and thereby we extend the previous literature on lifetime inequality, which has only considered income received before retirement. We use a dynamic structural life-cycle model to derive trajectories of earnings...