Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Wirtschafts- und finanzpolitische Rahmenbedingungen

Entrepreneurship versus Joblessness? Explaining the Rise in Self-Employment

The self-employed constitute a large proportion of the workforce in developing countries and the sector has been found to be growing further. Different accounts exist as to the cause of this development, with pull factors such as high returns to capital and increased wealth contrasted with push factors such as barriers to entry into the wage sectors following traditional segmeted labour market...

Political Socialization in Flux? Linking Family Non-Intactness during Childhood to Adult Civic Engagement

Over the last several decades, there has been a widespread decrease in civic engagement coinciding with a breakdown in traditional family structures in many countries throughout the developed world. According to Putnam in Bowling alone (2000), however, none of the major declines in civic engagement can be accounted for by the decline in traditional family structures. In this paper, we seek to...

Estimating the Employment Effects of a Minimum Wage from a Cross-Sectional Wage Distribution: A Semi-Parametric Approach

On the basis of a structural labor demand model employment effects of a minimum wage are estimated from a single cross-sectional wage distribution. The main contribution of the paper is to relax restrictive functional form assumptions of earlier papers by adopting semi-parametric censored quantile regressions to this framework. We apply the model to the sectoral minimum wage in the German...

Are We Architects of Our Own Happiness? The Importance of Family Background for Well-Being

This paper analyzes whether individuals have equal opportunity to achieve happiness (or wellbeing). Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), we estimate sibling correlations and intergenerational correlations in four self-reported measures of well-being: life satisfaction, satisfaction with household income, job satisfaction, and satisfaction with health. We find high sibling...

Intergenerational Transmissions and Sibling Correlations in Extreme Right-Wing Party Affinity and Attitudes towards Immigration

Big Banks and Macroeconomic Outcomes: Theory and Cross-Country Evidence of Granularity

Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? In this paper, we develop a theory of granularity (Gabaix, 2011) for the banking sector, introducing Bertrand competition and heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using this framework, we show conditions under which idiosyncratic shocks to bank lending can generate aggregate fluctuations in the credit supply when the...

Local Warming and Violent Conflict in North and South Sudan

Weather shocks and natural disasters, it has been argued, represent a major threat to national and international security. Our paper contributes to the emerging micro-level strand of the literature on the link between local variations in weather shocks and conflict by focusing on a pixel-level analysis for North and South Sudan at different geographical and time scales between 1997 and 2009....

A Theory of Sovereign Risk Premia and Financial Intermediation in the Euro Area

The European sovereign debt crisis has highlighted the role of spillovers from sovereign default risk to financial intermediation in shaping macroeconomic dynamics. We propose a quantitative model which captures this feedback mechanism by allowing for explicit default on public debt and occasionally binding collateral constraints on the interbank market in a general equilibrium setting. A link to...

Responsive Feed-in Tariff Adjustment to Dynamic Technology Development

This paper reviews the adjustments of the feed-in tariff for new solar photovoltaics (PV) installations in Germany. As PV system prices have declined rapidly since 2009, 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 up to...

Estimating Crowding Costs in Public Transport

Preferences for transport activities are often considered only in terms of time and money. Whilst congestion in automobile traffic increases costs by raising trip durations, the same is less obvious in public transport (PT), especially rail-based. This has lead many economic analyses to conclude that there exists a free lunch by reducing the attractiveness of automobile transport (most efficiently...

Health-Related Life Cycle Risks and Public Insurance

This paper proposes a dynamic life cycle model of health risks, labor market participation, early retirement, and wealth accumulation to analyze the health-related risks of consumption and old age poverty. In particular, the model includes a health process, the interaction between health and employment risks, and an explicit modeling of the German public insurance schemes. I rely on a dynamic...

The 'Celtic Case': Guarantees, Transparency and Dual Debt Crises

Bank liability guarantee schemes have traditionally been viewed as costless measures to shore up investor confidence and stave off bank runs. However, as the experience of some European countries, most notably Ireland, has demonstrated, the credibility and effectiveness of these guarantees is crucially intertwined with the sovereign's funding risks. Employing methods from the literature on global...

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 by a reallocation effect resulting from an increase in the relative size of more productive firms. The relative importance of this reallocation effect and the scale effect well known from the literature, and...

The Role of CO2-EOR for the Development of a CCTS Infrastructure in the North Sea Region: A Techno-Economic Model and Application

Scenarios of future energy systems attribute an important role to Carbon Capture, Transport, and Storage (CCTS) in achieving emission reductions. Using captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery (CO2-EOR) can improve the economics of the technology. This paper examines the potential for CO2-EOR in the North Sea region. UK oil fields are found to account for 47% of the estimated total additional...

The Incidence of Social Security Contributions: Evidence from German Administrative Data

This paper applies a test for the incidence of social security contributions based on the reaction of gross wages in response to a variation in social security contributions. Exploiting an increase of the East German taxable maximum of health insurance, a difference-in-differences approach is used to estimate its effects on yearly changes in gross wages. It is shown that employees earning somewhat...

Day Care Quality and Differences in Children's Health and Personality Characteristics

Day care attendance is an early investment in children¿s human capital accumulation. Yet studies examining the effect of day care participation on later outcomes such as secondary schooling or non-cognitive skills identify mixed results. In the economic literature day care attendance has positive and negative effects on educational outcomes. These contradictive results might be due to unobserved...

Armed Conflict, Sex Ratio and Marital Outcomes: Evidence from Rwanda

We use armed conflict in Rwanda as a natural experiment to study the impact of a decrease in the sex ratio on the marriage market. Combining detailed information on conflict intensity with pre- and post-war individual-level data, we find several effects of the shortage of middle-aged men in the marriage market. First, fewer men remained single in the post-war period, while more middle-aged women...

Heterogeneity in Tax-Motivated Profit Shifting and Its Effects on Corporate Investment

This study provides evidence on the causal impact of debt shifting activities of multinational companies on capital accumulation. My identification strategy exploits the corporate tax reform 2008 in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment. This reform reduced the corporate income tax rate by 10 percentage points. Depending on the location of the parent company, the reform abolished the tax incentive...

The Effects of Disintegrated Distribution