Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Adverse Effects of Increased Education Efficiency? The Impact of Shortening High School Tenure on Graduation Age, Grade Repetitions and Graduation Rates

In designing education systems, policy-makers face a trade-off between the provision of higher levels of schooling and earlier labour market entries. A fundamental education reform in Germany tackles this trade-off by increasing education efficiency: The time in high school is reduced by one year while the total number of instruction hours is left unchanged. Employing administrative data on all...

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

We evaluate the actual effectiveness of disincentives that have been introduced for early retirement in Germany. Therefore, we set up a detailed model of the German social security and tax system with special attention to the PAYG-pension system. Building on the fact that the institutional changes were phased in, impacting birth cohorts to a different degree we are able to estimate the parameters...

Illiquidity Risk and Liquidity Regulation

This paper studies the following questions related to the liquidity regulation of banks and financial intermediaries. (a) Under which circumstances does liquidity underinsurance occur,so that liquidity regulation is necessarily required? (b) Is regulation the most efficient way to mitigate underinsurance? (c) How does liquidity regulation interact with other regulatory measures and the liquidity...

Asymmetric Information and Rollover Risk

How do banks choose their debt maturity structure when credit markets are subject to information frictions? This paper proposes a model of equilibrium maturity choice with asymmetric information and endogenous roll-over risk. We show that in the presence of public signals about firms' creditworthiness (credit ratings), firms choose to expose themselves to positive roll-over risk in order to...

Gas, Tax and Cars: How Does Differential Fuel Taxation Impact New Car Purchases?

This paper sets out to identify the impact of fuel taxes on new car purchases, using exhaustive individual-level data of monthly registration of new private cars in France from 2003 to 2007. Detailed information on the car holder enables us to account for heterogeneous preferences across purchasers. We find that sensitivity of short-term demand with respect to fuel prices is generally low....

Regional versus Bilateral Cost Sharing in Electricity Transmission Expansion

The costs of cross-border transmission links have traditionally been shared equally between the two involved countries. However, capacity expansions are likely to create positive and negative externalities on a larger scale for all countries in a meshed electricity network. In this paper we compare a regional cost sharing framework (i.e., proportional allocation) to the traditional bilateral...

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