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DIW Discussion Papers 1847 / 2020
Paid parental leave schemes have been shown to increase women's employment rates but decrease their wages in case of extended leave durations. In view of these potential trade-offs, many countries are discussing the optimal design of parental leave policies. We analyze the impact of a major parental leave reform on mothers' long-term earnings. The 2007 German parental leave reform replaced a means-tested ...
2020| Corinna Frodermann, Katharina Wrohlich, Aline Zucco
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DIW Discussion Papers 1846 / 2020
Following World War I, rent control became a standard policy response to the housing shortage and the resulting rent increases. Typically, economists blame it for creating inefficiencies in the housing market and beyond. We investigate whether rental market regulations (including rent control, protection of tenants from eviction, and housing rationing) had any effects in a middle-income Latin American ...
2020| Alejandro D. Jacobo, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1845 / 2020
We decompose permanent earnings risk into contributions from hours and wage shocks. To distinguish between hours shocks, modeled as innovations to the marginal disutility of work, and labor supply reactions to wage shocks we formulate a life-cycle model of consumption and labor supply. Both permanent wage and hours shocks are important to explain earnings risk, but wage shocks have greater relevance. ...
2020| Robin Jessen, Johannes König
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DIW Discussion Papers 1844 / 2020
This paper links banking systems development to the colonial and legal history of African countries. Specifically, we investigate the impact of differing legal traditions on the development of existing investor and creditor protection, and on African banking systems. Based on a sample of 40 African countries from 2000 to 2016, our empirical findings show a significant dependence of current financial ...
2020| Samuel Mutarindwa, Dorothea Schäfer, Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 1843 / 2020
Many industries are seeing an increase in concentration, leading to a discussion on the effectiveness of horizontal merger enforcement. The policy debate shows that one of the key arguments put forward when supporting potential mergers is the possibility of realization of merger efficiency gains, specifically in the transport industry. Yet, there exists little empirical evidence on the actual effects ...
2020| Ariane Charpin, Joanna Piechucka
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DIW Discussion Papers 1842 / 2020
Multivariate Adaptive Regression Spline (MARS) is a simple and powerful non-parametric technique that automatizes the selection of non-linear terms in regression models. Non-linearities and spatial effects are natural characteristics in numerous spatial hedonic pricing models. In this paper, we propose using the MARS data-driven methodology combined with the Instrumental Variables method in order to ...
2020| Fernando A. López, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1841 / 2020
We use US household survey data from 2001-2017 to investigate whether monetary policy has heterogeneous effects on women's and men's financial portfolio decisions by analyzing their equity investment. On the one hand, monetary policy significantly affects the entry decisions of women, but not of men: after a contractionary shock, the probability of women entering the stock market decreases. On the ...
2020| Caterina Forti Grazzini, Chi Hyun Kim
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DIW Discussion Papers 1840 / 2020
Industrial demand response can play an important part in balancing the intermittent production from a growing share of renewable energies in electricity markets. This paper analyses the role of aggregators – intermediaries between participants and the electricity market – in facilitating industrial demand response. Based on the results from semi-structured interviews with German demand response aggregators, ...
2020| Jan Stede, Karin Arnold, Christa Dufter, Georg Holtz, Serafin von Roon, Jörn C. Richstein
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DIW Discussion Papers 1839 / 2020
The (re-)introduction of rent regulation in the form of rent controls, tenant protection or supply rationing is back on the agenda of policymakers in light of rent inflation in many global cities. While rent control as social policy promises short-term relief, economists point to their negative long-run effects on new construction. This paper present long-run data on both rent regulation and housing ...
2020| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Sebastian Kohl
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DIW Discussion Papers 1838 / 2019
Using quantile regression methods, this paper analyses the gender wage gap across the wage distribution and over time (1990-2014), while controlling for changing sample selection into full-time employment. Our findings show that the selection-corrected gender wage gap is much larger than the one observed in the data, which is mainly due to large positive selection of women into fulltime employment. ...
2019| Patricia Gallego Granados, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1837 / 2019
We compare prominent global energy scenarios of organisations and companies. We supplement the analysis with four own scenarios, which were derived from structured analytic techniques in combination with a numerical global energy and resource market model (Multimod). Our study provides three central contributions: (i) a compact survey of selected outlooks with meta characteristics (conceptual nature, ...
2019| Dawud Ansari, Franziska Holz, Hashem al-Kuhlani
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DIW Discussion Papers 1836 / 2019
This paper presents a broad retrospective evaluation of mergers and merger decisions in the digital sector. We first discuss the most crucial features of digital markets such as network effects, multi-sidedness, big data, and rapid innovation that create important challenges for competition policy. We show that these features have been key determinants of the theories of harm in major merger cases ...
2019| Elena Argentesi, Paolo Buccirossi, Emilio Calvano, Tomaso Duso, Alessia Marrazzo, Salvatore Nava
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DIW Discussion Papers 1835 / 2019
Cartels can severely harm social welfare. Competition authorities introduced leniency rules to destabilize existing cartels and hinder the formation of new ones. Empirically, it is difficult to judge the success of these measures because functioning cartels are unobservable. Existing experimental studies confirm that a leniency rule indeed reduces cartelization. We extend these studies by having a ...
2019| Maximilian Andres, Lisa Bruttel, Jana Friedrichsen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1834 / 2019
This paper explores whether governments can ban carbon-intensive materials through product carbon requirements. By setting near-zero emission limits for the production of materials to be sold within a jurisdiction, governments would accelerate the phase out of carbon-intensive production processes. Their announcement could alert basic materials producers, financing institutions, and other relevant ...
2019| Timo Gerres, Manuel Haussner, Karsten Neuhoff, Alice Pirlot
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DIW Discussion Papers 1833 / 2019
This paper analyzes nuclear power plant investments using Monte Carlo simulations of economic indicators such as net present value (NPV) and levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). In times of liberalized electricity markets, largescale decarbonization and climate change considerations, this topic is gaining momentum and requires fundamental analysis of cost drivers. We adopt the private investors’ perspective ...
2019| Ben Wealer, Simon Bauer, Leonard Göke, Christian von Hirschhausen, Claudia Kemfert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1832 / 2019
This paper studies market segmentation that arises from the introduction of a price ceiling in the market for rental housing. When part of the market faces rent control, theory predicts an increase of free-market rents, a consequence of misallocation of households to housing units. We study a large-scale policy intervention in the German housing market in 2015 to document this mechanism empirically. ...
2019| Andreas Mense, Claus Michelsen, Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1831 / 2019
Structural VAR models require two ingredients: (i) Informational sufficiency, and (ii) a valid identification strategy. These conditions are unlikely to be met by small-scale recursively identified VAR models. I propose a Bayesian Proxy Factor-Augmented VAR (BP-FAVAR) to combine a large information set with an identification scheme based on an external instrument. In an application to monetary policy ...
2019| Martin Bruns
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DIW Discussion Papers 1830 / 2019
In this paper, we use 2008-2013 American Community Survey data to update and further probe evidence on son preference in the United States. In light of the substantial increase in immigration, we examine this question separately for natives and immigrants. Dahl and Moretti (2008) found earlier evidence consistent with son preference in that having a female first child raised fertility and increased ...
2019| Francine D. Blau, Lawrence M. Kahn, Peter Brummund, Jason Cook, Miriam Larson-Koester
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DIW Discussion Papers 1829 / 2019
As the policy debate on entrepreneurship increasingly centers on firm growth in terms of job creation, it is important to better understand which variables influence the first hiring decision and which ones influence the subsequent survival as an employer. Using the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP), we analyze what role individual characteristics of entrepreneurs play in sustainable job creation. ...
2019| Marco Caliendo, Frank M. Fossen, Alexander S. Kritikos
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DIW Discussion Papers 1828 / 2019
Devising appropriate policy measures for the integration of refugees is high on the agenda of many governments. This paper focuses on the social integration of families seeking asylum in Germany between 2013 and 2016. Exploiting differences in services availability across counties as an exogenous source of variation, we evaluate the effect of early education attendance by refugee children on their ...
2019| Ludovica Gambaro, Guido Neidhöfer, C. Katharina Spieß