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DIW Discussion Papers 1747 / 2018
Expanding public or publicly subsidized childcare has been a top social policy priority in many industrialized countries. It is supposed to increase fertility, promote children's development and enhance mothers' labor market attachment. In this paper, we analyze the causal effect of one of the largest expansions of subsidized childcare for children up to three years among industrialized countries on ...
2018| Kai-Uwe Müller, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1746 / 2018
Cost of renewable energies have dropped, approaching wholesale power price levels. As a result, the role of renewable energy policy design is shifting – from covering incremental costs towards facilitating risk-hedging. An analytical model of the financing structure of renewable investment projects is developed to assess this effect und used to compare different policy design choices: contracts for ...
2018| Karsten Neuhoff, Nils May, Jörn C. Richstein
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DIW Discussion Papers 1745 / 2018
The aim of this paper is to showcase different decarbonization pathways for Germany and Europe with varying Carbon dioxide (CO2) constraints until 2050. The Global Energy System Model (GENeSYS-MOD) framework, a linear mathematical optimization model, is used to compute low-carbon scenarios for Europe as a whole, as well as for 17 European countries or regions. The sectors power, low- and high-temperature ...
2018| Karlo Hainsch, Thorsten Burandt, Claudia Kemfert, Konstantin Löffler, Pao-Yu Oei, Christian von Hirschhausen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1744 / 2018
Many important decisions within public and private organizations are based on recommendations from expert committees and advisory boards. A notable example is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's advisory committees, which make recommendations on new drug applications. Previously the voting procedure for these committees was sequential, however, due to concerns of herding and momentum effects the ...
2018| Melissa Newham, Rune Midjord
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DIW Discussion Papers 1743 / 2018
We conduct a randomized field experiment to study the effects of two financial education interventions offered to small-scale retailers in Western Uganda. The treatments contrast “active learning” with “traditional lecturing” within standardized lesson-plans. We find that active learning has a positive and economically meaningful impact on savings and investment outcomes, in contrast to insignificant ...
2018| Tim Kaiser, Lukas Menkhoff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1742 / 2018
Several studies show that young women start with lower wage expectations than men, even before entering the labor market and that this partly translates into the actual gender wage gap through effects on educational choice and the formation of reservation wages. Building on the theoretical reasoning of compensating differentials proposing that the labor market compensates higher wage risk with higher ...
2018| Vaishali Zambre
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DIW Discussion Papers 1741 / 2018
We evaluate the labor market and distributional effects of an increase in the early retirement age (ERA) from 60 to 63 for women. We use a regression discontinuity design which exploits the immediate increase in the ERA between women born in 1951 and 1952. The analysis is based on the German micro census which includes about 370,000 households per year. We focus on heterogeneous labor market effects ...
2018| Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan, Anna Hammerschmid, Michael Peters
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DIW Discussion Papers 1740 / 2018
This paper assesses redenomination risk in the euro area. We first estimate daily default-risk-free yield curves for French, German, and Italian bonds that can be redenominated and for bonds that cannot. Then, we extract the compensation for redenomination risk from the yield spreads between these two types of bonds. Redenomination risk primarily shows up at the short end of yield curves. At the height ...
2018| Christian Bayer, Chi Hyun Kim, Alexander Kriwoluzky
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DIW Discussion Papers 1739 / 2018
This paper sheds new light on how African countries’ legal systems and institutions influence the governance and stability of their banks. We find that institutional factors, in particular the legal family of origin, political stability, contract enforcement and strength of investor protection promote central corporate governance reforms. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we also reveal that ...
2018| Samuel Mutarindwa, Dorothea Schäfer, Andreas Stephan
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DIW Discussion Papers 1738 / 2018
Common ownership - where two firms are at least partially owned by the same investor - and its impact on product market outcomes has recently drawn a lot of attention from scholars and practitioners alike. Theoretical and empirical researchsuggests that common ownership can lead to higher prices. This paper focuses on implications for market entry. To estimate the effect of common ownership on entry ...
2018| Melissa Newham, Jo Seldeslachts, Albert Banal-Estanol
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DIW Discussion Papers 1737 / 2018
To internalize pollution externalities into household waste generation, Unit Pricing Systems (UPS) have been adopted worldwide. This paper evaluates the causal effects of a UPS on the disposal of municipal solid waste in Trento, Italy. To account for policy endogeneity due to unobservables, we employ the synthetic control method on a unique panel of monthly waste generation. Our results show that the ...
2018| Matheus Bueno, Marica Valente
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DIW Discussion Papers 1736 / 2018
Dieses Discussion Paper wurde auf Wunsch der Autoren zurückgezogen. - This discussion paper was withdrawn at the request of the authors.
2018| Olaf Hübler, Lukas Menkhoff, Ulrich Schmidt
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DIW Discussion Papers 1735 / 2018
In the 2011 post-Arab Spring migration wave, over 64,000 migrants landed on the southern Italian coast, with many of them potentially working illegally on farms through caporalato, a widespread system of illegal recruitment of underpaid farm labor run by Italian agrimafias. To test this hypothesis, this paper evaluates the causal effects of the 2011 migration wave on reported labor productivity focusing ...
2018| Stefan Seifert, Marica Valente
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DIW Discussion Papers 1734 / 2018
Assortment decisions are key strategic instruments for firms responding to local market conditions. We assess this claim by studying the effect of a national merger between two large Dutch supermarket chains on prices and on the depth as well as composition of assortment. We adopt a difference-in-differences strategy that exploits local variation in the merger’s effects, controlling for selection on ...
2018| Elena Argentesi, Paolo Buccirossi, Roberto Cervone, Tomaso Duso, Alessia Marrazzo
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DIW Discussion Papers 1733 / 2018
Using exchange rates futures instead of forwards completes the maturity spectrum of the correlation between the spot return and the premium. The correlation decreases with increasing maturity, presumably due to a latent risk premium. We hypothesize that the influence of the unobserved risk factor has a contract-specific risk component. Our main contribution is to control for the omitted variable bias ...
2018| Kerstin Bernoth, Jürgen von Hagen, Casper G. de Vries
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DIW Discussion Papers 1732 / 2018
We analyze whether start-up rates in different industries systematically change with business cycle variables. Using a unique data set at the industry level, we mostly find correlations that are consistent with counter-cyclical influences of the business cycle on entries in both innovative and non-innovative industries. Entries into the largescale industries, including the innovative part of manufacturing, ...
2018| Alexander Konon, Michael Fritsch, Alexander S. Kritikos
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DIW Discussion Papers 1731 / 2018
This paper examines the degree of persistence in UK inflation by applying long-memory methods to historical data that span the period from 1660 to 2016. Specifically, we use both parametric and non-parametric fractional integration techniques, that are more general than those based on the classical I(0) vs. I(1) dichotomy. Further, we carry out break tests to detect any shifts in the degree of persistence, ...
2018| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana, Tommaso Trani
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DIW Discussion Papers 1730 / 2018
Are there economies of scale to data in internet search? This paper is first to use real search engine query logs to empirically investigate how data drives the quality of internet search results. We find evidence that the quality of search results improve with more data on previous searches. Moreover, our results indicate that the type of data matters as well: personalized information is particularly ...
2018| Maximilian Schäfer, Geza Sapi, Szabolcs Lorincz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1729 / 2018
We use a cointegrated structural vector autoregressive model to investigate the relation between euro area monetary policy and the stock market. Since there may be an instantaneous causal relation we consider long-run identifying restrictions for the structural shocks and also use (conditional) heteroskedasticity in the residuals for identification purposes. Heteroskedasticity is modelled by a Markov-switching ...
2018| Helmut Lütkepohl, Aleksei Netsunajev
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DIW Discussion Papers 1728 / 2018
This study analyses how liquidity risk affects bonds’ yield spreads after controlling for credit risk, bond-specific characteristics and macroeconomic variables. Using two liquidity estimates, LOT liquidity and the bid-ask spread, we find that, in particular, the LOT liquidity measure has explanatory power for the yield spread of green bonds. Overall, however, the impact of LOT decreases over time, implying ...
2018| Febi Wulandari, Dorothea Schäfer, Andreas Stephan, Chen Sun