Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Employment Generation in Rural Africa: Mid-term Results from an Experimental Evaluation of the Youth Opportunities Program in Northern Uganda

Can cash transfers promote employment and reduce poverty in rural Africa? Will lower youth unemployment and poverty reduce the risk of social instability? We experimentally evaluate one of Uganda's largest development programs, which provided thousands of young people nearly unconditional, unsupervised cash transfers to pay for vocational training, tools, and business start-up costs. Mid-term...

Differential Taxation and Firms' Financial Leverage: Evidence from the Introduction of a Flat Tax on Interest Income

Tax competition for the mobile factor capital has led to a trend in many countries to levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. In this study, we analyze the effect of such differential taxation on the debt ratio of firms. We exploit a 2009 tax reform in Germany as a quasi-experiment, which introduced a flat final withholding...

The Effect of Health and Employment Risks on Precautionary Savings

This paper extends the idea of using ex-ante risk measures in a model of precautionary savings by explicitly simulating future net-income risks. The uncertainty measure takes into account the interdependency of labour market status and health. The model is estimated for prime age males using the German Socio-Economic Panel Study for years 2001-2007. The empirical analysis is conducted using a...

Business Cycles and Financial Intermediation in Emerging Economies

This paper explores the quantitative role of financial market frictions on capital flows and the business cycle in emerging markets. A financial sector in close analogy to Gertler and Karadi (2011) is embedded in an otherwise standard neoclassical model of a small open economy. An agency problem between international investors and domestic banks gives rise to an endogenously determined leverage...

Evidence of Market Power in the Atlantic Steam Coal Market Using Oligopoly Models with a Competitive Fringe

The representation of market power in numerical partial equilibrium models is often derived using the concept of conjectural variations. We provide a better understanding of this concept from the theoretical basis to its implementation in numerical models. We use an analytical duopoly model in different settings to show that the best response of a player can be in conflict with the assumptions...

Looking for Jobs with Good Pay and Good Working Conditions

In perfectly competitive labour markets, there is a market for non-material. - job amenities in which workers' willingness to pay for these goods implies. - that workers accept compensating wage differentials, such that jobs with better. - working conditions should have lower wages. In labour market characterised. - by frictions, workers' wages typically depend also on firm productivity.. -...

Occupational Sex Segregation and Management-Level Wages in Germany: What Role Does Firm Size Play?

The paper analyzes the gender pay gap in private-sector management positions based on German panel data and using fixed-effects models. It deals with the effect of occupational sex segregation on wages, and the extent to which wage penalties for managers in predominantly female occupations are moderated by firm size. Drawing on economic and organizational approaches and the devaluation of women's...

Lifetime Earnings Inequality in Germany

This paper documents the magnitude, pattern, and evolution of lifetime earnings inequality in Germany. Based on a large sample of earnings biographies from social security records, we show that the intra-generational distribution of lifetime earnings of male workers has a Gini coefficient around .2 for cohorts born in the late 1930s and early 1940s; this amounts to about 2/3 of the value of the...

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...

Trick or Treat? Maternal Involuntary Job Loss and Children's Non-cognitive Skills

Negative effects of job loss on adults such as considerable fall in income have long been examined. If job loss has negative consequences for adults it may spread to their children. But potential effects on children's non-cognitive skills and the related mechanisms have been less examined. This paper uses propensity score matching to analyze maternal involuntary job loss and its potential causal...

Liquidity Crises, Banking, and the Great Recession

This paper presents a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model which studies the business-cycle implications of financial frictions and liquidity risk at the bank-level. Following Holmström and Tirole (1998), demand for liquidity reserves arises from the anticipation of idiosyncratic operating expenses during the execution phase of bank-financed investment projects. Banks react to adverse...

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 nonbinding 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...

Innovation Policy for SMEs in Germany: Actual Trends

Entrepreneurship and Economic Performance: A Geographically Weighted Regression Approach for European Regions

Measuring Regional Inequality by Internet Car Price Advertisements: Evidence for Germany

Approximating Unit Commitment Using Mathematical Programming under Equilibrium Constraints

The Impact of Labour Market Activation Policies on Insiders' and Outsiders' Low-Wage Risk

Policy and Research Workshop. Innovative Longitudinal Tools for International Research in the Social Sciences: Panel Discussion

Does Job Stress Impact Social Involvement? Findings in the Health and Retirement Study

Transitory Shocks, Permanent Inequality and the Welfare State: Decomposing Half a Century of Earnings Dynamics in Germany