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DIW Discussion Papers 725 / 2007
We propose a new methodology for comparing poverty over multiple periods across time and space that does not arbitrarily aggregate income over various years or rely on arbitrarily specified poverty lines or poverty indices. Following Duclos et al. (2006a), we use the multivariate stochastic dominance methodology to create dominance surfaces for different time spans. We elaborate the method first for ...
2007| Johannes Gräb, Michael Grimm
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DIW Discussion Papers 724 / 2007
How individual wages change with time, and how they are expected to change as individuals grow older, is one of crucial determinants of their behaviour on the labour market including their decision to retire. The profile of individual hourly wages has for a long time been assumed to follow an "inverse-U" path, although there has been little work specifically concerning the age-wage profile and documenting ...
2007| Michal Myck
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DIW Discussion Papers 723 / 2007
This paper investigates predictions of Porter's Diamond model regarding the impact of locational factors on innovativeness and performance at the firm level. We formulate a structural equation model based on the relationships between locational conditions, e.g., transportation infrastructure, proximity to universities and research institutes, qualified labour, on the one hand, and innovativeness measured ...
2007| Alexander Eickelpasch, Anna Lejpras, Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 722 / 2007
German chemical manufacturing industry is marked by two major structural changes during 1992-2004. Firstly, number of firms was ranging extensively: from 676 to 901, while only 96 firms represented balanced panel. Secondly, size of the firm dropped considerably-by 88%. This paper is intended to shed light on both phenomena. Based on reliable census data analysis suggests the former evidence be explained ...
2007| Oleg Badunenko
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DIW Discussion Papers 721 / 2007
The paper advocates for a new measure of the ethnic identity of migrants, models its determinants and explores its explanatory power for various types of their economic performance. The ethnosizer, a measure of the intensity of a person's ethnic identity, is constructed from information on the following elements: language, culture, societal interaction, history of migration, and ethnic self-identification. ...
2007| Amelie Constant, Klaus F. Zimmermann
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DIW Discussion Papers 720 / 2007
This paper studies the productivity impact of heterogeneous capital inputs of selected EU-15 member countries and of the U.S. at the macroeconomic level. The stochastic possibility frontiers approach of Battese and Coelli (1992) applied here is used to identify neutralities or non-neutralities between different heterogeneous capital and labor inputs. Owing to the introduction and estimation of two-stage ...
2007| Georg Erber, Reinhard Madlener
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DIW Discussion Papers 719 / 2007
Using individual based micro-data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), I analyze the cyclicality of real wages for male workers within employer-employee matches over the period 1984-2004, and compare different wage measures: the standard hourly wage rate, hourly wage earnings including overtime and bonus payments, and the effective wage, which takes into account not only paid overtime, ...
2007| Silke Anger
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DIW Discussion Papers 718 / 2007
The economic literature has largely overlooked the importance of repeat and circular migration. The paper studies this behavior by analyzing the number of exits and the total number of years away from the host country using count data models and panel data from Germany. More than 60% of migrants from the guestworker countries are indeed repeat or circular migrants. Migrants from European Union member ...
2007| Amelie Constant, Klaus F. Zimmermann
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DIW Discussion Papers 717 / 2007
The local business tax as the main revenue source of local governments in Germany has been under extensive debate for decades. Proposals for reform range from a broad tax base in the sense of an origin-based value-added tax to a pure profit tax that could be implemented as a surcharge on corporation and personal income tax. Local business taxation systems in OECD countries actually represent the whole ...
2007| Frank M. Fossen, Stefan Bach
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DIW Discussion Papers 716 / 2007
In this paper we test the hypothesis that the economic transition toward a market economy increases the efficiency of firms. We study 32 Polish electricity distribution companies between 1997-2002, by applying common benchmarking methods to the panel: the nonparametric data envelopment analysis (DEA), the free disposal hull (FDH), and, as a parametric approach, the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA). ...
2007| Astrid Cullmann, Christian von Hirschhausen
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DIW Discussion Papers 715 / 2007
This paper explores the use of informal credit as a strategy for managing risks by market women in northern Ghana. A broad concept of the costs of risk management strategies is introduced and encompasses both a time and monetary dimension. Based on qualitative data, the analysis reveals that market women invest a considerable amount of time in maintaining complex networks of informal credit providers ...
2007| Kati Schindler
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DIW Discussion Papers 714 / 2007
The objective of this paper is to develop a model to determine the price formation of wholesale electricity markets. For that purpose, we model wholesale electricity prices depending on the prices of fuels (coal and natural gas) and of CO2 emission allowances using a Markov Switching Regression. We apply the model to wholesale electricity prices in the UK and in Germany. While British electricity prices ...
2007| Georg Zachmann
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DIW Discussion Papers 713 / 2007
This paper presents a new approach to obtain unbiased estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL) with labor market data. Investigating job changes, we combine the advantages of recent panel studies, which allow to control for unobserved heterogeneity of workers, and conventional cross-sectional estimations, which primarily exploit the variation of wage and risk between different jobs. We find ...
2007| Hannes Spengler, Sandra Schaffner
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DIW Discussion Papers 712 / 2007
Effects of renewable support legislation on electricity prices have been analyzed with a plethora of models. However, these models neglect at least one of the following aspects which we take into account in our analysis: oligopolistic market behavior of dominant firms, emission trading, restricted electricity trade and production capacities, and effects on producer prices and firm profits. In this ...
2007| Thure Traber, Claudia Kemfert
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DIW Discussion Papers 711 / 2007
This study examines the wage gender gap of young adults in the 1970s, 1980s, and 2000 in the US. Using quantile regression we estimate the gender gap across the entire wage distribution. We also study the importance of high school characteristics in predicting future labor market performance. We conduct analyses for three major racial/ethnic groups in the US: Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, employing ...
2007| Spyros Konstantopoulos, Amelie Constant
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DIW Discussion Papers 710 / 2007
This paper provides empirical evidence how the timing of employment breaks affects pension benefits in Germany. Analysing the biographical data set from the German Pension Insurance (SUF VVL 2004) the employment histories of individuals aged 21 to 60 can be mirrored in detail. We relate differences in pension benefits to employment breaks due to unemployment and parental leave in the individual life ...
2007| Niklas Potrafke
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DIW Discussion Papers 709 / 2007
The aim of this paper is to estimate income advantages arising from publicly provided educa-tion and to analyse their impact on the income distribution in Germany. Using representative micro-data from the SOEP and considering regional and education-specific variation, from a cross-sectional perspective the overall result is the expected levelling effect. When estimating the effects of accumulated educational ...
2007| Joachim R. Frick, Markus M. Grabka, Olaf Groh-Samberg
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DIW Discussion Papers 708 / 2007
This paper applies the literature on asymmetric price transmission to the emerging commodity market for EU emissions allowances (EUA). We utilize an error correction model and an autoregressive distributed lag model to measure the relationship between CO2 price changes and the development of wholesale electricity prices. Using data from the German market for electricity and EUAs, we find that the rising ...
2007| Georg Zachmann, Christian von Hirschhausen
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DIW Discussion Papers 707 / 2007
The role patents play for innovation is not clear, but patenting activity has increased in the last decades. This article reviews the empirical evidence on traditional and novel roles of patents to assess their impacts on innovation in developing countries. It shows that patents are not likely to support innovation in developing countries, even though their non-traditional functions fulfill important ...
2007| Andréanne Léger
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DIW Discussion Papers 706 / 2007
This paper studies gender discrimination against entrepreneurs by financial institutions. Based on the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) that covers firms in several countries of Western Europe as well as in the transition countries of Eastern Europe, our analysis suggests that female-managed firms are less likely to obtain a bank loan compared with male-managed counterparts. ...
2007| Alexander Muravyev, Dorothea Schäfer, Oleksandr Talavera