Diskussionspapiere

Unionisation Structures and Innovation Incentives

This paper examines how different unionisation structures affect firms' innovation incentives and industry employment. We distinguish three modes of unionisation with increasing degree of centralisation: (1) "Decentralisation" where wages are determined independently at the firm-level, (2) "coordination" where one industry union sets individual wages for all firms, and (3) "centralisation" where an ...

Asymmetric Monetary Policy Effects in Germany

In a small structural model we find asymmetries in the effects of monetary policy in Germany depending on whether the economy is in an upswing or a downswing. These two different regimes are also identified using a Markov-switching model and the Kalman filter. Our results indicate that the effects of monetary policy are significantly higher in a downswing than in an upswing. It follows not only that ...

Do the Best Go West? An Analysis of the Self-Selection of Employed East-West Migrants in Germany

Since the inequality of earnings in East Germany has approached West German levels in the late 1990s, the standard Roy model predicts that a positive selection bias of East-West migrants should disappear. Using a switching regression model and data from the IAB-employment sample, we find however that employed East-West migrants remain positively self-selected with respect to unobserved abilities. This ...

Occupational Choice across Generations

There are few studies on occupational choices in Germany, and the second generation occupational choice and mobility is even less investigated. Such research is important because occupations determine success in the labor market. In a country like Germany occupations also reflect a general socio-economic standing. This paper looks at the patterns of employment in Germany, analyzes how individual men ...

Discrete Choice Labor Supply: Conditional Logit vs. Random Coefficient Models

Estimating labor supply functions using a discrete rather than a continuous specification has become increasingly popular in recent years. On basis of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP) I test which specification of discrete choice is the appropriate model for estimating labor supply: the standard conditional logit model or the random coefficient model. To the extent that effect heterogeneity is ...

International Market Integration for Natural Gas? A Cointegration Analysis of Prices in Europe, North America and Japan

We examine the degree of natural gas market integration in Europe, North America and Japan, between the mid 1990's and 2002. The relationship between the international gas marker prices, and their relation to the oil price, are investigated through principal component analysis and Johansen likelihood-based procedures. Both of them show a high level of integration within the European/Japanese and North ...

Identification, Characteristics and Impact of Faked Interviews in Surveys: An Analysis by Means of Genuine Fakes in the Raw Data of SOEP

To the best of our knowledge, most of the few methodological studies which analyze the impact of faked interviews on survey results are based on “artificial fakes” generated by project students in a “laboratory environment”. In contrast, panel data provide a unique opportunity to identify data which are actually faked by interviewers. By comparing data of two waves, unequivocal fakes are easily identifiable. ...

International Migration to Germany: Estimation of a Time-Series Model and Inference in Panel Cointegration

In this paper we study the determinants of international migration to Germany, 1967-2000. The empirical literature on macro-economic migration functions usually explains migration flows by a set of explanatory variables such as the income differential, employment rates, and migrations stocks as in Hatton (1995), for example. Since macroeconomic variables are widely acknowledged as nonstationary, the ...

Circular Movements and Time away from the Host Country

The economic literature has largely overlooked the importance of repeat migration. This paper studies repeat or circular migration as it is manifested by the frequency of exits of migrants living in Germany, and by the number of years being away from the host country using count data models. More than 60% of the guestworker generation currently living in Germany, the largest European immigration country, ...

Unusual Behaviour of Dickey-Fuller Tests in the Presence of Trend Misspecification: Comment

In this paper we present explanation on the phenomenon pointed out in Cook and Manning (2002) on the unusual behaviour of the Dickey-Fuller test in the presence of trend misspecification. It appears that the rejection frequency of the unit root tests in the presence of trend misspecification is very sensitive to the number of the initial observations that need to be discarded. Based on the evidence ...

Konzessionsmodelle für Fernstraßen in Deutschland: eine ökonomische Analyse der Risikoallokation beim F- und A-Modell

In diesem Beitrag wird die Risikoallokation bei Betreibermodellen für Bundesfernstraßen nach dem F- und A-Modell untersucht. Zunächst werden kurz die Defizite des traditionellen Modells der Herstellung und Bereitstellung von Fernstraßen in Deutschland dargestellt und die Struktur der beiden Konzessionsmodelle bewertet. Dann werden Handlungsempfehlungen zur Risikoallokation bei Konzessionsmodellen für ...

Creating Low Skilled Jobs by Subsidising Market-Contracted Household Work

We analyze the determinants of household work contracted in the German shadow economy. The German socio-economic household panel, which enumerates casual domestic employment, is used to estimate the demand for such household work. The regressors include regional wage rates, household income and several control variables for household composition. We find that the demand for household work in the shadow ...

What Makes an Entrepreneur and Does It Pay? Native Men, Turks, and Other Migrants in Germany

This paper focuses on the entrepreneurial endeavors of immigrants and natives in Germany. We pay closer attention to Turks, since they are the largest immigrant group with a strong entrepreneurial tradition, and the self-employed Turks in Germany represent about 70% of all Turkish entrepreneurs in the European Union. We identify the characteristics of the self-employed individuals and understand their ...

Winners and Losers: Fragmentation, Trade and Wages Revisited

Our paper investigates the link between international outsourcing and wages utilising a large household panel and combining it with industry level information on industries' outsourcing activities from input-output tables. By doing so we can arguably overcome the potential aggregation bias as well as other shortcomings that affect industry level studies. We find that outsourcing has had a marked impact ...

Coping Strategies in Post-War Rural Mozambique

This paper analyses post-war coping strategies by farm households in developing countries. The analysis is based on a portfolio model of activity choices in war-affected rural Sub- Saharan Africa. A case study using farm household survey data estimates the determinants of agricultural coping strategies in post-war Mozambique. Post-war coping strategies differ from pre- and mid-crisis coping strategies. ...

Productivity Differences in the European Union: National, Regional and Spatial Effects

Using panel data on European regions and applying Analysis of Covariance, our study provides an empirical assessment of the relative importance of national, regional and spatial factors for explaining variations of productivity. Our analysis shows that initial economic conditions or agglomeration and centrality are indeed relevant for differences in productivity levels. What is far more important, ...

Multicointegration in US Consumption Data

The present paper tests for the existence of multicointegration between real per capita private consumption expenditure and real per capita disposable personal income in the USA. In doing so, we exploit the fact that the flows of disposable income and consumption expenditure on the one hand, and the stock of consumers' wealth, which can be considered as cumulative past discrepancies between the flows ...

Long-Run Forecasting in Multicointegrated Systems

Location Decisions in a Changing Labour Market Environment

We study the location of various film-related services (such as camera rental, casting agencies or pyrotechnic services), the main determinant of interest being the human capital specificity. We show that firms which supply services with a lower firm specificity locate farther away from one another, and argue that it can be concluded that the "poaching" argument (fear of employees leaving for a competitor ...

Exports, International Investment, and Plant Performance: Evidence from a Non-Parametric Test

This paper compares the performance of purely domestic plants, domestic exporters and domestic multinationals. For our empirical analysis we utilise a non-parametric approach based on the principle of first order stochastic dominance. We find that the distributions for multinationals dominate that of domestic exporters and non-exporters, while we do not find clear differences in plant performance between ...