The German government has committed to reducing the primary energy demand of buildings by 80% by 2050 and to attaining a thermal retrofit rate of 2%. Achieving both goals will require deep thermal retrofits across the existing building stock. To meet this challenge, the government is exploring what role tax support options could play in encouraging thermal retrofits and ensuring that they deliver the ...
The Eurozone is still stuck in a downward spiral: high public and private debts weigh on potential growth; gloomy prospects for growth prevent the further reduction of these debts. A European plan to support growth should be a complement, and not a substitute, to the ongoing efforts to reduce public deficits. It should both encourage structural reforms and incentivize investments. In the short term, ...
Conducting a building thermal efficiency retrofit (or further thermal retrofit) is a long and relatively complex decision-making process involving building owners, managers, residents/tenants, and construction industry professionals. A variety of information instruments exists to support participants at each stage of this process. This paper highlights the existing literature on information instruments ...
The German government is committed to reducing the primary energy demand of buildings by 80% by 2050. This requires increasing the rate of thermal retrofits from the current 0.8% to 2.0% per year. To explore how new and existing policies and programs could deliver the increased retrofit rate, this paper examines the thermal efficiency retrofit decision-making process among owners of single- and two-family ...
Based on the notion that entrepreneurship is a 'local event' , the literature argues that selfemployed workers and entrepreneurs are 'rooted' in place. This paper tests the 'residential rootedness'-hypothesis of self-employment by examining for Germany and the UK whether the self-employed are less likely to move or migrate than employees. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-economic Panel ...
In this paper, we construct the country-specific chronologies of the house price bubbles for 12 OECD countries over the period 1969:Q1- 2010:Q2. These chronologies are obtained using a combination of a fundamental and a filter approaches. The resulting speculative bubble chronology is the one that provides the highest concordance between these two techniques. In addition, we suggest an early warning ...
Excessive speculation on asset markets can cause significant macroeconomic losses in terms of production and employment. Such developments should be detected as early and as reliably as possible in order to enable corrective action through adequate economic policy measures. This is the goal of the early warning system, which was developed by DIW Berlin on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Finance for ...
The appropriate design of monetary policy in integrated financial markets is one of the most challenging areas for central banks. One hot topic is whether the increase in liquidity has contributed to the formation of price bubbles in asset markets in the years preceding the financial crisis. If linkages are strong, the inclusion of asset prices in the monetary policy rule may limit speculative runs ...
The very first minimum wage in Germany was introduced in 1997 for blue-collar workers in sub-sectors of the construction industry. In the setting of a natural experiment blue-collar workers in neighboring 4-digit-industries and white-collar workers are used as control groups for differences-in-differences-in-differences estimation based on linked employer-employee data. Estimation results reveal a ...