Topic Consumers

Modeling Geographical Preferences to Study the Welfare Implication of Airbnb's Presence in the Short-Term Accomodation Market

Abstract:  We study competition between Airbnb and hotel accommodations in Paris in 2017 to assess the welfare implications of Airbnb’s presence on hotels and travelers. The existing literature on the subject exclusively uses across city variation in Airbnb diffusion. Consequently, it does not take into account that the location of an accommodation within a city might be an important...

Corona-Pandemic

Researchers at DIW Berlin are taking a closer look at the economic effects of the ongoing 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Here you can find all DIW Berlin publications on the consequences of the pandemic, which are leaving deep marks on not only the global and German economies, but also on society itself.

Decomposing Trust

Abstract:  Trust is thought to be an important driver of economic growth and other economic outcomes. Previous studies suggest that trust may be a combination of risk attitudes, distributional preferences, betrayal aversion, and beliefs about the probability of being reciprocated. We compare the results of a binary trust game to the results of a series of control treatments that remove the...

The Effect of Self-Control on Borrowing: Experimental Evidence

This paper examines the effect of reduced self-control on debt-taking in a laboratory experiment. We manipulate self-control using an ego depletion task and show that it is effective. Following the ego depletion task, participants can anonymously buy hot drinks on credit. We find no significant average effects, but find that treated individuals that have low financial literacy are more likely to buy ...

Libra, Bitcoin & Co. - Determinants of Non-cash Payments and Alternative Money: Editorial

Determinants of Financial Literacy among German Students: An Empirical Analysis

Finanzkompetenzen haben für die gesellschaftliche Teilhabe eine hohe Bedeutung. Dieser Beitrag führt eine empirische Evaluation der Determinanten der Finanzkompetenz von Studierenden an einer deutschen Hochschule durch. Ein weiteres Ziel ist auch die Identifizierung der geschlechtsspezifischen Unterschiede bei der Finanzkompetenz. Die Evaluierung basiert auf der Definition und den Erhebungen zur Finanzkompetenz, ...

Financial Literacy and Intertemporal Arbitrage

We study the role of financial literacy for inter-temporal decision-making using an adapted version of the Convex Time Budget Protocol (Andreoni and Sprenger 2012). While we find no evidence of dynamically inconsistent preferences in the aggregate, we document substantial heterogeneity in choice-patterns and estimated parameters at the individual-level: We find that subjects with higher levels of financial ...

The Relationship between Financial Literacy and Financial Inclusion

About two billion people in the world do not own a financial account and there are many more who use financial services only occasionally. In the past, initiatives which address these problems of financial exclusion focused on the supply side of financial markets, in particular by increasing the branch network of banks and by offering cheap bank products. While this had the desired effect, recent ...

Inform Me When It Matters: Cost Salience, Energy Consumption, and Efficiency Investments

Effective attention to information may play a prominent role in consumer choice for energy-intensive services and it may simply be a function of receiving timely information when consumption takes place. This paper investigates whether and why the timing of utility bills leads to salience bias in heat energy consumption. In Germany, the 12-month billing period varies across buildings with a significant ...

The Financial Accelerator, Wages, and Optimal Monetary Policy

This paper studies the effects of labor market outcomes on firms’ loan demand and on credit intermediation. In a first step, I investigate how wages in the production sector affect bank net worth and the process of financial intermediation in partial equilibrium. Second, the role of the identified channels are studied in general equilibrium using a new- Keynesian DSGE-model with financial frictions and ...