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DIW Discussion Papers 1827 / 2019
This paper shows that labor demand plays an important role in the labor market reactions of older women affected by pension deductions for early retirement. Based on a large representative sample of the German workforce (SIAB), we calculate the consequences of individual financial incentive changes caused by a pension reform in Germany on employment, unemployment, and partial retirement. The reform ...
2019| Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan, Svenja Lorenz, Mona Pfister, Thomas Zwick
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DIW Discussion Papers 1826 / 2019
This study tests the prediction that a corrupt government reduces ethical behavior among its citizens. We integrate a standard "cheating" experiment into a broad household survey and find clear support for this prediction: respondents who perceive corruption in state affairs are more likely to cheat. Interestingly, there is a small group of non-conformers. The main relation is robust to consideration ...
2019| Olaf Hübler, Melanie Koch, Lukas Menkhoff, Ulrich Schmidt
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DIW Discussion Papers 1825 / 2019
We develop a structural model to address the question whether, and to what extent, expert panelists engage in herd behavior when voting on important policy questions. Our data comes from FDA advisory committees voting on questions concerning the approval of new drug applications. We utilize a change in the voting procedure from sequential to simultaneous voting to identify herding. Estimates suggest ...
2019| Melissa Newham, Rune Midjord
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DIW Discussion Papers 1824 / 2019
We analyze the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social status. Status concerns motivate richer individuals to vote for the public provision of goods they themselves buy in markets: a higher provision level attracts more individuals to the public sector, enhancing the social exclusivity of market purchases. Majority voting may lead to a public ...
2019| Jana Friedrichsen, Tobias König, Tobias Lausen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1823 / 2019
This RCT examines the effect of a new style finance training during which participants are given personalized feedback on their financial business outcomes in addition to a “rules-of-thumb” training approach. We compare this to the effects of a “rules-of-thumb” training by itself and to a control group. Targeting about 500 small and micro entrepreneurs in Kampala, Uganda, we find that the personalized ...
2019| Antonia Grohmann, Lukas Menkhoff, Helke Seitz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1822 / 2019
Since the global financial crisis and the related restructuring of banking systems, bank concentration is on the rise in many countries. Consequently, bank size and its role for macroeconomic volatility (or: stability) is the subject of intense debate. This paper analyzes the effects of financial regulations on the link between bank size, as measured by the volume of the loan portfolio, and volatility. ...
2019| Franziska Bremus, Melina Ludolph
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DIW Discussion Papers 1821 / 2019
We present evidence on the open economy consequences of US fiscal policy shocks identified through proxy-instrumental variables. Tax shocks and government spending shocks that raise the government budget deficit lead to persistent current account deficits. In particular, the negative response of the current account to exogenous tax reductions through a surge in the demand for imports is among the strongest ...
2019| Mathias Klein, Ludger Linnemann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1820 / 2019
This paper provides first empirical insights on the relationship between green public procurement (GPP) and firms' innovation activities. Considering that the public sector is a large buyer in the economy, public procurement is able to work as demand-pull factor for new products and thus innovations - given that the procurement is aimed at such objectives. GPP is specifically implemented to contribute ...
2019| Vera Zipperer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1819 / 2019
CO2-Abgaben bergen die Gefahr, einkommensschwächere Haushalte überdurchschnittlich zu belasten. Zur Abwehr solcher regressiven Verteilungswirkungen wird erwogen, einen Teil der Einnahmen durch einen Pro-Kopf-Bonus an die Bürger*innen zurückzugeben. Der vorliegende Beitrag entwickelt einen Vorschlag für einen in das deutsche Krankenversicherungssystem integrierten Bonus. Dazu werden zunächst die Ziele ...
2019| Roland Ismer, Manuel Haußner, Klaus Meßerschmidt, Karsten Neuhoff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1818 / 2019
Gegenwärtig sind die verschiedenen Energieträger in Deutschland unterschiedlich stark mit Abgaben und Umlagen belastet. Um die energie- und klimapolitischen Ziele der Bundesregierung zu erreichen, müssen fossile Heiz- und Kraftstoffe stärker bepreist werden (Kemfert et al. 2019; Dertinger und Schill 2019, SRU 2019). Zugleich herrscht in der energiepolitischen Debatte Uneinigkeit über die die Ausgestaltung ...
2019| Claudia Kemfert, Sophie Schmalz, Nicole Wägner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1817 / 2019
We present evidence that the practice of holding back poorly performing students affects estimates of the impact of class size on student outcomes based on within-school variation of cohort size over time. This type of variation is commonly used to identify class size effects. We build a theoretical model in which cohort size is subject to random shocks and students whose performance falls below a ...
2019| Maximilian Bach, Stephan Sievert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1816 / 2019
In this study, we set up a DSGE model with upward looking consumption comparison and show that consumption externalities are an important driver of consumer credit dynamics. Our model economy is populated by two different household types. Investors, who hold the economy’s capital stock, own the firms and supply credit, and workers, who supply labor and demand credit to finance consumption. Furthermore, ...
2019| Mathias Klein, Christopher Krause
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DIW Discussion Papers 1815 / 2019
Although universal childcare has become an essential tool to support child development, few economic studies analyze its effects on non-cognitive skills and little is known about causal effects on these skills in the long run. In this paper we go beyond short run analyses and examine the long run effects of one additional year of universal childcare on students’ personality traits in adolescence. We ...
2019| Maximilian Bach, Josefine Koebe, Frauke H. Peter
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DIW Discussion Papers 1814 / 2019
Macroprudential policies for financial institutions have received increasing prominence since the global financial crisis. These policies are often aimed at the commercial banking sector, while a host of other non-bank financial institutions, or shadow banks, may not fall under their jurisdiction. We study the effects of tightening commercial bank regulation on the shadow banking sector. For this purpose, ...
2019| Stefan Gebauer, Falk Mazelis
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DIW Discussion Papers 1813 / 2019
In energy efficiency networks, groups of firms exchange experiences on energy conservation in regular meetings over several years. The companies implement energy efficiency measures in order to reach commonly agreed energy savings and CO2 reduction goals. Existing evaluations of such voluntary regional networks claim that participants improved energy efficiency at twice the speed of the industry average. ...
2019| Jan Stede
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DIW Discussion Papers 1812 / 2019
This paper analyzes the impact of urbanization on CO2 emissions within the STIRPAT framework over the period 1971 to 2014 for a panel of 76 countries clustered into income groups. Using dynamic panel estimations techniques, the empirical results robustly show an inverted N-shaped relationship between urbanization and CO2 emissions in the long-term associated with the ecological modernization theory ...
2019| Lars Sorge, Anne Neumann
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DIW Discussion Papers 1811 / 2019
This paper analyzes the nature of democratic development in a nation on the process of introducing nuclear power over the period 1960 - 2017 for an unbalanced panel of 171 countries. Given the involved political process of introducing nuclear power and its political importance, as well as the current tendency of about 30 countries to “go nuclear”, this question is both of historic and current interest. ...
2019| Lars Sorge, Anne Neumann, Christian von Hirschhausen, Ben Wealer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1810 / 2019
We examine the introduction of a gender quota law in Germany, mandating a minimum 30% of the underrepresented gender on the supervisory boards of a particular type of firms. We exploit the fact that Germany has a two-tier corporate system consisting of the affected supervisory boards and unaffected management boards within the same firm. We find a positive effect on the female share on supervisory ...
2019| Alexandra Fedorets, Anna Gibert, Norma Burow
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DIW Discussion Papers 1809 / 2019
This paper analyzes the impact of a reduction in women's labor supply through retirement on their informal care provision. Using SOEP data from the years 2001- 2016 the analysis addresses fundamental endogeneity problems by applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity design. We exploit early retirement thresholds for women in the German pension system as instruments for their retirement decision. We ...
2019| Björn Fischer, Kai-Uwe Müller
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DIW Discussion Papers 1808 / 2019
We document day care enrolment gaps by family background for children under 3 in Germany. Research demonstrates that children of less-educated or foreign-born parents benefit most from day care, making it important to understand the causes of such enrolment gaps. Using a unique data set that records both actual and preferred day care usage, we demonstrate that differences in demand cannot fully explain ...
2019| Jonas Jessen, Sophia Schmitz, Sevrin Waights