Vorträge des DIW Berlin

Interrelationships among Four Labour Market States, Subjective Life Satisfaction, Personality and Values and Attitudes

Synergies in Socioeconomic and Remote Sensing Data

Interethnic Friendships in Germany

Wealth Inequality and the Relevance of Public Pension Entitlements

A Methodology for the Calculation of the Global Economic Costs of Conflict

Innovative Activity in Renewable Energy Technologies: Empirical Evidence of Knowledge Spillovers

This paper studies technological change in renewable energies, providing empirical evidence on the determinants of innovative activity with a special emphasis on the role of knowledge spillovers. We investigate two major renewable energy technologies - wind and solar - across a panel of 21 OECD countries over the period 1978 to 2004. Spillovers may occur at the national level, either within the...

Innovation in Concentrating Solar Power Technologies: A Study Drawing on Patent Data

Better understanding the innovative process of renewable energy technologies is important for tackling climate change. Though concentrating solar power is receiving growing interest, innovation studies so far have explored innovative activity in solar technologies in general, ignoring the major differences between solar photovoltaic and solar thermal technologies. This study relies on patent data...

Bestandsaufnahme: Privates Vermögen, seine Verteilung und Auswirkungen der Ungleichverteilung

Cost Efficiency and Subsidization in German Local Public Bus Transit

Subsidies are considered important means to facilitate the provision of public transit, yet the empirical evidence implies that they can have harming effects on costs and possibly also on operators' performance. This paper examines the impacts of deficit-balancing subsidies on the cost inefficiency of local public bus companies in Germany, where a complex system allocates ample financial support....

Cost Efficiency and Economies of Scale and Density in German Water Distribution

This paper studies the cost structure of water distribution utilities in Germany. Stochastic cost frontier models are applied to an unbalanced panel of 371 observations of 72 companies in the period from 1998 to 2007. The results suggest that some utilities could reduce their costs by more than 20%. Water losses and elevation differences in a service area turn out to be significant cost drivers....

Preference for Randomization: Empirical and Experimental Evidence

I Want to, But I Also Need To: Start-ups Resulting from Opportunity and Necessity

When unemployed persons go into business, they often are characterized as necessity entrepreneurs, because push factors, namely their unemployment, likely prompted their decision. In contrast to this, business founders who have been previously employed represent opportunity entrepreneurs because pull factors provide the rationale for their decision. However, a data set of nearly 1,900 business...

RDS - a Stata Program for Respondent-Driven Sampling

Das Alterseinkommen von MigrantInnen: herkunftsspezifische Ungleichheiten und Erklärungskraft von Bildungs- und Erwerbsbiographien

Is Eastern Germany on the Jump to Close the Productivity Gap? Firm-Level Evidence in Manufacturing

Mikrokredite: Wie hoch ist die Nachfrage nach solchen Produkten in Deutschland?

Are Geese Flying by Themselves inside China?: An LSTR-SEM Approach to Income Convergence of Chinese Counties

The Globalization of Steam Coal Markets and the Role of Logistics: An Empirical Analysis

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive multivariate cointegration analysis of three parts of the steam coal value chain - export, transport and import prices. The analysis is based on a rich dataset of international coal prices; in particular, we combine data on steam coal prices with freight rates, covering the period December 2001 until August 2009 at weekly frequency. We then test whether...

Vom Winde verweht?: Strommarktpreise und Anreize für Investitionen in thermische Kraftwerke bei wachsendem Windstromangebot

One Last Puff? Public Smoking Bans and Smoking Behavior

This paper investigates the short-term effects of public smoking bans on individual smoking behavior. In 2007 and 2008, state-level smoking bans were gradually introduced in all of Germany's sixteen federal states. We exploit this variation in the timing of state bans to identify the effect that smoke-free policies had on individuals' smoking propensity and smoking intensity. Using rich...