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Price Guarantees, Consumer Search, and Hassle Costs

The paper deals with the competitive effects of price guarantees in a spatial duopoly where consumers can search for lower prices but have to incur hassle costs if they want to claim a price guarantee. It is shown that symmetric equilibria with and without price guarantees exist but price guarantees will have no effect on prices if search costs are low, hassle costs are high and the number of uninformed ...

The 4th Berlin IO Day

The Berlin IO Day is a one-day workshop sponsored by Berlin's leading academic institutions, including DIW Berlin, ESMT, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and WZB which takes place twice a year, in the Fall and in the Spring. The aim is to create an international forum for high quality research in Industrial Organization in the...

Is the Willingness to Take Financial Risk a Sex-Linked Trait? Evidence from National Surveys of Household Finance

We investigate whether the willingness to take investment risk is a sex-linked trait and link the results to the country's gender equality regime. Our empirical analysis involves household data on financial asset holdings as well as on self-reported risk tolerance for Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain. Of those countries, Italy is by far the country with the greatest degree of gender inequality ...

Income Distribution: An Important Factor for Economic Forecasts

The development of private consumption is a crucial factor in compiling macroeconomic projections as part of national accounts. Household savings also play an important role as an explanatory variable for consumer development, since private households must decide whether to spend their incomes on consumption or saving. The estimated savings rate in DIW Berlin's economic projections can be improved ...

Marital Risk, Family Insurance, and Public Policy

The present paper aims to quantify the growth and welfare consequences of changing family structures in western societies. For this reason we develop a dynamic general equilibrium model with both genders which takes into account changes of the marital status as a stochastic process. Individuals respond to these shocks by adjusting savings and labor supply. Our quantitative results indicate that the ...

Longevity, Life-Cycle Behavior and Pension Reform

Longevity, Life-Cycle Behavior and Pension Reform

How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this pressing open question in public finance, we estimate a life-cycle model in which the optimal employment, retirement and consumption decisions of forward-looking individuals depend, inter alia, on life expectancy and the design of the public pension system. We calculate that, ...

Broke, Ill, and Obese: The Effect of Household Debt on Health

We analyze the effect of household indebtedness on different health outcomes using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1999-2009. To establish a causal effect, we rely on (a) fixed-effects methods, (b) a subsample of constantly employed individuals, and (c) lagged debt variables to rule out problems of reverse causality. We apply different measures of household indebtedness, such as the ...

Intergenerational Transmission of Risk Attitudes: A Revealed Preference Approach

This study investigates whether the willingness to take income risks revealed by occupational choice is transmitted from parents to their children. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we find that fathers' riskiness of job is a significant determinant of children's occupational risk, in particular sons' (excluding parent-child pairs with identical occupations). This is the first ...

Health-Related Life Cycle Risks and Public Insurance

This paper proposes a dynamic life cycle model of health risks, employment, early retirement, and wealth accumulation in order to analyze the health-related risks of consumption and old age poverty. In particular, the model includes a health process, the interaction between health and employment risks, and an explicit modeling of the German public insurance schemes. I rely on a dynamic programming ...