Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Aktuelle Herausforderungen der Wirtschaftspolitik: Keynote

Wirtschaftspolitische Perspektiven für die neuen Bundesländer: Podiumsdiskussion

Buyer Power and Category Captainship

Toward an Efficient Use of R&D: Accounting for Heterogeneity in the OECD

Informational Opacity and Honest Certification

Consolidating the Water Industry: An Analysis of the Potential Gains from Horizontal and Vertical Integration in a Conditional Efficiency Framework

Gründungen und Selbständigkeit in Deutschland: Trends und Entwicklungen

The Importance of Family Background for Cognitive and Non-cognitive Skills

Diskussionsteilnahme

Diskussionsteilnahme

Urbanization - Economic Dynamic and Social Problems

Association between Early Attendance of Day Care Centers and Prevalence of Eczema

Non-cognitive Skills and the Economics of Entrepreneurial Decision Making

Based on a large, representative German household panel, this paper investigates whether non-cognitive skills influence entrepreneurial decision making, in particular the entry and exit decision, the latter one thus capturing entrepreneurial survival. The analysis reveals that there are some variables that affect the economic decision of becoming an entrepreneur and different ones or different...

Disentangling Demand and Supply Shocks in the Crude Oil Market: How to Check Sign Restrictions in Structural VARs

Given the growing dissatisfaction with exclusion and long-run restrictions in structural vector autoregressive analysis, sign restrictions are becoming increasingly popular. So far there are no techniques for validating the shocks identified via such restrictions. Although in an ideal setting the sign restrictions specify shocks of interest, sign restrictions may be invalidated by measurement...

The Forward Premium Puzzle and Latent Factors Day by Day

We use futures instead of forward rates to study the complete maturity spectrum of the forward premium puzzle from two days to six months. At short maturities the slope coefficient is positive, but these turn negative as the maturity increases to the monthly level. Futures data allow us to control for the influence of an unobserved factor that can be decomposed into a contract-specific and a time-...

Financial Integration and Macroeconomic Stability: What Role for Large Banks?

This study assesses how banking sector integration and especially cross-border lending affect macroeconomic stability. I use a two-country general equilibrium model with heterogeneous banks that are hit by idiosyncratic shocks. According to the concept of granularity, idiosyncratic shocks to large firms (or: banks) do not have to cancel out under a skewed distribution of firm sizes. Given the...

Who Has to Leave and Why? Displacement in Kyrgyzstan: Evidence from a New Micro-Level Dataset

Incidences of mass displacement constitute a major obstacle to economic and social prosperity in many developing countries. While significant progress in understanding the micro-level foundations of violence is being made, quantitative evidence on individual and group interactions in displacement environments is still relatively scarce. In this paper, we use unique household and individual survey...

Spite and Cognitive Skills in Preschoolers

Although spiteful preferences play a crucial role in the development of human large-scale cooperation, there is little evidence on spiteful behavior and its determinants in children. We investigate the relationship between children¿s cognitive skills and spiteful behavior in a sample of 214 preschoolers aged 5-6 and their mothers. Other-regarding behavior of both mothers and children is elicited...

The Impact of Introducing an Interest Barrier: Evidence from the German Corporation Tax Reform 2008

In this study we investigate the impact of the thin capitalization rule newly introduced in Germany in 2008 on firms' capital structure, investment and profitability. The identification of the causal effects is based on the escape clauses within the regulation using a difference-in-difference approach. Our results suggest that firms strongly react to the new regulation in order to avoid the...

Technology-Skill Complementarity and International TFP Differences

What determines whether a country is better at using some technologies than others? A widely held view is that a country's ability to absorb and implement technologies is tied to its human capital. In this paper, we construct a novel specification of technology that incorporates this idea. Countries are comprised of a range of industries with heterogeneous productivities. In high human capital...