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DIW Discussion Papers 1787 / 2019
Starting from December 2012, insurers in the European Union were prohibited from charging gender-discriminatory prices. We examine the effect of this unisex mandate on risk segmentation in the German health insurance market. While gender used to be a pricing factor in Germany's private health insurance (PHI) sector, it was never used as a pricing factor in the social health insurance (SHI) sector. ...
2019| Shan Huang, Martin Salm
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DIW Discussion Papers 1786 / 2019
Dieser Beitrag möchte einen Impuls zur stärkeren Berücksichtigung von Genderaspekten in makroökonomischen Modellen geben. Am Beispiel der Philipps-Kurve geht es um die Frage, ob sich das Erwerbsverhalten von Frauen und Männern so stark voneinander unterscheidet, dass sich dies im Verlauf des Zusammenhangs von Inflation und Arbeitslosigkeit niederschlägt. Erste Hinweise dafür werden in deskriptiven ...
2019| Elke Holst, Denise Barth
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DIW Discussion Papers 1785 / 2019
Case and Deaton (2015) document that, since 1998, midlife mortality rates are increasing for white non-Hispanics in the US. This trend is driven by deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcohol-related diseases, termed as deaths of despair, and by the subgroup of low-educated individuals. In contrast, average mortality for middle-aged men and women continued to decrease in several other high-income ...
2019| Peter Haan, Anna Hammerschmid, Julia Schmieder
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DIW Discussion Papers 1784 / 2019
This paper provides the first comprehensive review of the empirical and theoretical literature on the determinants of the elasticity of substitution between capital and labor. Our focus is on the two-input constant elasticity of substitution (CES) production function. By example of the U.S., we highlight the distinctive heterogeneity in empirical estimates of σ at both the aggregate and industrial ...
2019| Michael Knoblach, Fabian Stöckl
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DIW Discussion Papers 1783 / 2019
Fairtrade certification aims at transferring wealth from the consumer to the farmer; however, coffee passes through many hands before reaching final consumers. Bringing together retail, wholesale, and stock market data, this study estimates how much more consumers are paying for Fairtrade-certified coffee in US supermarkets and finds estimates around $1 per lb. I then assess how this price premium ...
2019| Helene Naegele
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DIW Discussion Papers 1782 / 2019
Existing long-term energy and climate scenarios are typically a rather simple extrapolation of past trends. Both qualitative and quantitative outlooks co-exist, but they often focus narrowly on individual perspectives, which is opposed to the interlinked and complex nature of energy and climate. Therefore, this study presents a set of novel and multidisciplinary narratives that give insight into four ...
2019| Dawud Ansari, Franziska Holz, Hasan Basri Tosun
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DIW Discussion Papers 1781 / 2019
We examine the credit channel of monetary policy from 2000 to 2015 in the Euro Area using daily monetary policy shock and credit risk measures in an autoregressive distributed lag model. We find that an expansionary monetary policy shock leads to a short-run increase in the credit risk of non-financial corporations. This dysfunctionality of the credit channel is driven by the crisis-dominated post-2009 ...
2019| Chi Hyun Kim, Lars Other
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DIW Discussion Papers 1780 / 2019
This article studies the evolution of housing rents in St. Petersburg between 1880 and 1917, covering an eventful period of Russian and world history. We collect and digitize over 5,000 rental advertisements from a local newspaper, which we use together with geo-coded addresses and detailed structural characteristics to construct a quality-adjusted rent price index in continuous time. We provide the ...
2019| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Leonid Limonov, Sofie R. Waltl
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DIW Discussion Papers 1779 / 2019
With Germany’s nuclear phase-out, 23 reactors need to be dismantled in the near future. Initiated by the dire financial situation of the affected utilities in 2014, a major discourse on ensuring financial liability led to a redistribution of liabilities and finances, with the utilities remaining in charge of dismantling, while liability for interim and final storage now transferred to the public. This ...
2019| Tim Scherwath, Ben Wealer, Roman Mendelevitch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1778 / 2019
In the shadow of homeownership and public housing, social policy through the regulation of private rental markets is a neglected and underestimated field of social policy. This paper, therefore, presents unique new data on the development of private tenancy legislation through the binary coding of rent control, the protection of tenants from eviction, and rental housing rationing laws across more than ...
2019| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Sebastian Kohl, Yulia Prozorova, Julien Licheron
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DIW Discussion Papers 1777 / 2018
Motivated by the EU concept of Pre-Commercial Procurement and the massivepresence of SMEs in the European economy, we study how budget constraints affect R&D effort in sequential elimination tournaments. We show that introducingbudget constraints leads to a non-monotonicity in unconstrained contestants' effort.Furthermore, we show that if the budget asymmetry is not too large, unconstrainedcontestants ...
2018| Malin Arve, Olga Chiappinelli
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DIW Discussion Papers 1776 / 2018
Understanding the distributional impacts of market-based climate policies is crucial to design economically efficient climate change mitigation policies that are socially acceptable and avoid adverse impacts on the poor. Empirical studies that examine the distributional impacts of carbon pricing and fossil fuel subsidy reforms in different countries arrive at ambiguous results. To systematically determine ...
2018| Nils Ohlendorf, Michael Jakob, Jan Christoph Minx, Carsten Schröder, Jan Christoph Steckel
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DIW Discussion Papers 1775 / 2018
This study estimates mean and distributional effects of early between-school ability tracking on student achievement. For identification, I exploit heterogeneity in tracking regimes between German federal states. After comprehensive primary school, about 40% of students are selected for the academic track and taught in separate schools in all states. The remaining students, however, are either taught ...
2018| Sönke Hendrik Matthewes
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DIW Discussion Papers 1774 / 2018
A rich literature links knowledge inputs with innovative outputs. However, most of what is known is restricted to manufacturing. This paper analyzes whether the three aspects involving innovative activity - R&D; innovative output; and productivity - hold for knowledge intensive services. Combining the models of Crepon et al. (1998) and of Ackerberg et al. (2015), allows for causal interpretation of ...
2018| David B. Audretsch, Marian Hafenstein, Alexander S. Kritikos, Alexander Schiersch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1773 / 2018
This paper explores the extent to which emissions limits on stack concentrations under the Large Combustion Plant (LCP) Directive succeeded in mitigating local air pollutants from thermal power stations in the European Union. We take advantage of the discontinuities in regulation status to show that the emission performance standards led to sizeable declines in concentrations of SO2 , NOx, and particulate ...
2018| Puja Singhal
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DIW Discussion Papers 1772 / 2018
Understanding whether laws shape or simply reflect citizens’ attitudes is important but empirically difficult. We provide new evidence on this question by studying the relationship between legal same-sex relationship recognition policies (SSRRPs) and attitudes towards sexual minorities in Europe. Using data from the European Social Surveys covering 2002-2016 and exploiting variation in the timing of ...
2018| Cevat G. Aksoy, Christopher S. Carpenter, Ralph de Haas, Kevin Tran
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DIW Discussion Papers 1771 / 2018
This paper shows that politicians’ pressure to climb the career ladder increases bank risk exposure in their region. Chinese local politicians are set growth targets in their region that are relative to each other. Growth is stimulated by debt-financed programs which are mainly financed via bank loans. The stronger the performance pressure the riskier the respective local bank exposure becomes. This ...
2018| Li Wang, Lukas Menkhoff, Michael Schröder, Xian Xu
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DIW Discussion Papers 1770 / 2018
Although the proportion of students enrolled in college increased in the last decades, students from non-college family backgrounds remain underrepresented in higher education around the world. This study sheds light on whether the provision of information in a randomized controlled trial with more than 1,000 German high school students results in higher college enrollment rates. One year prior to ...
2018| Frauke H. Peter, C. Katharina Spieß, Vaishali Zambre
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DIW Discussion Papers 1769 / 2018
Using electricity for heating can contribute to decarbonization and provide flexibility to integrate variable renewable energy. We analyze the case of electric storage heaters in German 2030 scenarios with an open-source electricity sector model. Making customary night-time storage heaters temporally more flexible offers only moderate benefits because renewable availability during daytime is limited ...
2018| Wolf-Peter Schill, Alexander Zerrahn
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DIW Discussion Papers 1768 / 2018
This paper analyzes links between institutional harmonization and bilateral portfolio debt and equity holdings at the sectoral level. Motivated by the action plan for the European Capital Markets Union, we examine the potential for legal harmonization and convergence in institutional quality to affect financial structures. Our analysis yields three key insights. First, legal harmonization across the ...
2018| Franziska Bremus, Tatsiana Kliatskova