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DIW Discussion Papers 1687 / 2017
Both, a high quality of the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) setting and a high quality of the home learning environment foster children’s development. However, we know little about the interactions between ECEC quality and the home learning environment. We examine whether the child’s attendance in a high ECEC quality setting improves the quality of her home learning environment. We use very ...
2017| Susanne Kuger, Jan Marcus, C. Katharina Spiess
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DIW Discussion Papers 1686 / 2017
We model strategic interaction on a market where two labeling organizations compete and firms in duopoly decide which labels to offer. The incumbent label maximizes its own profit, and is challenged by an industry standard which maximizes industry profit. Using a nested logit, the result of this multi-stage game depends crucially on the degree of horizontal differentiation. Joint firm profit always ...
2017| Pio Baake, Helene Naegele
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DIW Discussion Papers 1685 / 2017
In 2008, the European Commission investigated E.ON, a large and vertically integrated electricity company, for the alleged abuse of a joint dominant position by strategically withholding generation capacity. The case was settled after E.ON agreed to divest 5,000 MW generation capacity as well as its extra-high voltage network. We analyze the effect of these divestitures on German wholesale electricity ...
2017| Tomaso Duso, Florian Szücs, Veit Böckers
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DIW Discussion Papers 1684 / 2017
Power systems with increasing shares of wind and solar power generation have higher capital and lower operational costs than traditional technologies. This increases the importance of the cost of finance for total system cost. We quantify how renewable policy design can influence cost of finance by addressing regulatory risk and facilitating hedging. We use interview data on wind power financing costs ...
2017| Nils May, Karsten Neuhoff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1683 / 2017
We address the question of whether media influences occupational choices. To theoretically examine media effects, we construct a dynamic Bayesian occupational choice model with sequential decisions under ambiguity due to imperfect information. We show that sufficiently intensive positive media articles and reports about entrepreneurship increase the probability of self-employment and decrease the probability ...
2017| Alexander Konon, Alexander Kritikos
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DIW Discussion Papers 1682 / 2017
While financial inclusion is typically addressed by improving the financial infrastructure we show that financial literacy, representing the demand-side of financial markets, also has a beneficial effect. We study this effect at the cross-country level, which allows to consider institutional variation. Regarding “access to finance”, financial infrastructure and financial literacy are mainly substitutes. ...
2017| Antonia Grohmann, Theres Klühs, Lukas Menkhoff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1681 / 2017
When consumers face a large number of alternatives, they tend to simplify the decision problem by reducing the number of available alternatives to a subset of relevant alternatives, i.e. a consideration set. Since consideration sets are typically unobserved, most studies in the demand literature have to assume a consideration model. If these consideration models are misspecified, the demand estimates ...
2017| Anna Lu
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DIW Discussion Papers 1680 / 2017
In retailing markets of storable goods, consumer behavior is typically characterized by stockpiling. While existing research has developed rich models for such strategic consumer behavior, little is known about how sellers should ideally respond to it. In this paper, we provide insights into how frequency and depth of promotions affect consumer purchases and seller revenues in the long run. We show ...
2017| Anna Lu
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DIW Discussion Papers 1679 / 2017
This paper develops a structural dynamic retirement model to investigate effects and corresponding underlying mechanisms of a partial retirement program on labor supply, fiscal balances, and the pension income distribution. The structural approach allows for disentangling the two counteracting mechanisms that drive the employment effects of partial retirement: 1) the crowding-out from full-time employment, ...
2017| Songül Tolan
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DIW Discussion Papers 1678 / 2017
This paper develops a path for the global energy system up to 2050, presenting a new application of the open source energy systems model OSeMOSYS to the community. It allows quite disaggregate energy and emission analysis: GENeSYS-MOD (Global Energy System Model) uses a system of linear equations of the energy system to search for lowestcost solutions for a secure energy supply, given externally defined ...
2017| Konstantin Löffler, Karlo Hainsch, Thorsten Burandt, Pao-Yu Oei, Claudia Kemfert, Christian von Hirschhausen
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DIW Discussion Papers 1677 / 2017
Flexibly coupling power and heat sectors may contribute to both renewable energy integration and decarbonization. We present a literature review of modelbased analyses in this field, focusing on residential heating. We compare geographical and temporal research scopes and identify state-of-the-art analytical model formulations, particularly concerning heat pumps and thermal storage. While numerical ...
2017| Andreas Bloess, Wolf-Peter Schill, Alexander Zerrahn
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DIW Discussion Papers 1676 / 2017
This paper studies the causal effect of status differences on moral disengagement and violence. To measure violent behavior, in the experiment, a subject can inflict a painful electric shock on another subject in return for money. We exogenously vary relative status in the realm of sexual attractiveness. In three between-subject conditions, the assigned other subject is either of higher, lower or equal ...
2017| Armin Falk
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DIW Discussion Papers 1675 / 2017
The relevance of spatial effects in the wage curve can be rationalized by the model of monopsonistic competition in regional labour markets. However, distortions in extracting the regional unemployment effects arise in standard regional (i.e. NUTS) classifications as they fail to adequately capture spatial processes. In addition, the nonstationarity of wages and unemployment is often ignored. Both ...
2017| Reinhold Kosfeld, Christian Dreger
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DIW Discussion Papers 1674 / 2017
We investigate the impact of competition policy enforcement on the functioning of European energy markets, and how sectoral regulation influences these outcomes. For this purpose, we compile a new dataset on the European Commission’s (EC) and EU member states’ competition policy decisions, and combine it with firm- and sector-level data. We find that EC merger policy has a positive and robust impact ...
2017| Tomaso Duso, Jo Seldeslachts, Florian Szücs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1673 / 2017
We investigate how personal income taxes affect the portfolio share of personal wealth that entrepreneurs invest in their own business. In a reformulation of the standard portfolio choice model that allows for underreporting of private business income to tax authorities, we show that a fall in the tax rate may increase investment in risky entrepreneurial business equity at the intensive margin, but ...
2017| Frank M. Fossen, Ray Rees, Davud Rostam-Afschar, Viktor Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1672 / 2017
The performance of information criteria and tests for residual heteroskedasticity for choosing between different models for time-varying volatility in the context of structural vector autoregressive analysis is investigated. Although it can be difficult to find the true volatility model with the selection criteria, using them is recommended because they can reduce the mean squared error of impulse ...
2017| Helmut Lütkepohl, Thore Schlaak
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DIW Discussion Papers 1671 / 2017
We investigate how worries in Germany change across time and age, drawing on both closed-ended questions (which typically list a number of worry items) and open-ended questions answered in text format. We find that relevant world events influence worries. For example, worries about peace peaked in 2003, the year of the Iraq War, with a considerable number of respondents also referring to the Iraq war ...
2017| Julia M. Rohrer, Martin Bruemmer, Jürgen Schupp, Gert G. Wagner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1670 / 2017
This paper investigates the degree of persistence of market fear. Specifically, two different long-memory approaches (R/S analysis with the Hurst exponent method and fractional integration) are used to analyse persistence of the VIX index over the sample period 2004-2016, as well as some sub-periods (pre-crisis, crisis and post-crisis). The findings indicate that its properties change over time: in ...
2017| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana, Alex Plastun
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DIW Discussion Papers 1669 / 2017
This paper examines global and regional stock market integration in Asia at both the aggregate and disaggregate (industry) level by applying the Phillips-Sul (2007) tests for panel and club convergence. The main findings can be summarised as follows. In the pre-2008 crisis period, no integration/convergence of any kind is found. By contrast, in the post-crisis period, the Asian stock markets appear ...
2017| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Kefei You
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DIW Discussion Papers 1668 / 2017
This paper employs a price-based measure of integration, namely stock return differentials between ten emerging Asian economies and the US (as an indicator of global integration), as well as Japan and the Asian region (as two alternative indicators of regional integration), to test for mean reversion and draw inference on financial integration. It makes a three-fold contribution: it uses not only aggregate ...
2017| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana, Kefei You