We analyze workers’ risk preferences and training investments. Our conceptual framework differentiates between the investment risk and insurance mechanisms underpin-ning training decisions. Investment risk leads risk-averse workers to train less; they undertake more training if it insures them against future losses. We use the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to demonstrate that risk affinity is ...
This study examines the effect of a soft commitment device in the form of a savings goal calendar on savings for small business owners in Kampala, Uganda. We run a randomized controlled trial (RCT) under which the treatment group receives a calendar designed to set savings goals and to make a plan to reach this goal. The control group is given a plain calendar. We find no average effect on savings, ...
We investigate patterns in common ownership networks between firms that are active in the US pharmaceutical industry for the period 2004-2014. Our main findings are that “brand firms” — i.e. firms that have R&D capabilities and launch new drugs — exhibit relatively dense common ownership networks with each other that further increase significantly in density over time, whereas the network of “generic ...
The coronavirus pandemic has affected the Gulf countries in a particular way. In addition to the direct consequences of the pandemic, the spread of the coronavirus has led to a collapse in demand for the Gulf countries’ most important source of revenue: oil. Its price, which had fallen initially due to the price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, collapsed in spring 2020. Although it recovered somewhat ...
What are the long-term economic effects of a more equal distribution of wealth? We exploit variation in historical inheritance rules for land traversing political, linguistic, geological, and religious borders in Germany. In some German areas, inherited land was to be shared or divided equally among children, while in others land was ruled to be indivisible. Using a geographic regression...
Maximilian Schäfer has successfully defended his dissertation at the Technische Universität Berlin in November 2020. The dissertation with the title "Three Essays on the Economics of Digitization" was supervised by Prof. Dr. Tomaso Duso (DIW Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin) and Prof. Dr. Hannes Ullrich (DIW Berlin, University of Copenhagen). Maximilian was a PhD student in the ...
We investigate how the economic consequences of the pandemic, and of the government-mandated measures to contain its spread, affected the self-employed relative to employed individuals in Germany and, secondly, to what extent the female self-employed were more strongly hit than their male counterparts. For our analysis, we use representative real-time survey data in which respondents were asked about ...
This paper applies a microeconomic-based stylized model to identify the optimal modal split of water supply infrastructure in regions of the Global South against the background of the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) No. 6. We assume a linear city, with some plausible assumptions on income and willingness-to-pay, and then calculate the optimal tap density, leading in turn to an optimal modal split ...
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