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DIW Discussion Papers 1547 / 2016
Minimum wages may be an important instrument to reduce income inequality in a society and to promote socially inclusive economic growth. While higher minimum wages can support the Chinese transformation towards consumption driven growth, they can worsen the price competitiveness in export markets. As they differ throughout the country, this paper investigates their determinants at the regional level. ...
2016| Christian Dreger, Reinhold Kosfeld, Yanqun Zhang
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DIW Discussion Papers 1546 / 2016
We analyze the link between R&D, innovation, and productivity in MSMEs with a special focus on micro firms with fewer than 10 employees; usually constituting the majority of firms in industrialized economies. Using the German KfW SME panel, we examine to what extent micro firms are different from other firms in terms of innovativeness. We find that while firms engage in innovative activities with smaller ...
2016| Julian Baumann, Alexander S. Kritikos
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DIW Discussion Papers 1545 / 2016
This paper examines the effects of newspaper headlines on the exchange rates vis-à-vis both the US dollar and the euro for the currencies of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). The data are daily and cover the period 03/1/2000- 12/5/2013. The estimated VAR-GARCH(1,1) model allows for both mean and volatility spillovers and for the possible impact of the recent financial crisis ...
2016| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Fabio Spagnolo, Nicola Spagnolo
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DIW Discussion Papers 1544 / 2016
A fundamental question regarding the design of electricity markets is whether adding auctions to the continuous intraday trading is improving the performance of the market. To approach this question, we assess the experience with the implementation of the 3 pm local auction for quarters in Germany at the European Power Exchange (EPEX SPOT) in December 2014 to assess the impact on trading volumes/liquidity, ...
2016| Karsten Neuhoff, Nolan Ritter, Aymen Salah-Abou-El-Enien, Philippe Vassilopoulos
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DIW Discussion Papers 1543 / 2016
We analyze a simple supply chain with one supplier, one retailer and uncertainty about market demand. Focusing on the incentives of the supplier and the retailer to enhance their private information about the actual market conditions, we show that choices on information acquisition are strategic complements. While the retailer's incentives are mainly driven by the information rent that he can earn, ...
2016| Pio Baake, Andreas Harasser, Friederike Heiny
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DIW Discussion Papers 1542 / 2016
Unemployment insurance agencies may combat moral hazard by punishing refusals to apply to assigned vacancies. However, the possibility to report sick creates an additional moral hazard, since during sickness spells, minimum requirements on search behavior do not apply. This reduces the ex-ante threat of sanctions. We analyze the effects of vacancy referrals and sanctions on the unemployment duration ...
2016| Gerard J. van den Berg, Barbara Hofmann, Arne Uhlendorff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1541 / 2016
This paper examines the effects of Islamic banking on the causal linkages between credit and GDP by comparing two sets of seven emerging countries, the first without Islamic banks, and the second with a dual banking system including bothIslamic and conventional banks. Unlike previous studies, it checks the robustness of the results by applying both time series and panel methods; moreover, it tests ...
2016| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Mohamad Husam Helmi
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DIW Discussion Papers 1540 / 2016
The emerging literature on power markets with high shares of fluctuating renewables suggests that more frequent start-up procedures of thermal power plants may become an increasing concern, both for costs and possibly also for market design. Based on official scenario assumptions, we investigate how start-ups and related costs develop in Germany, where the share of fluctuating renewables quadruples ...
2016| Wolf-Peter Schill, Michael Pahle, Christian Gambardella
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DIW Discussion Papers 1539 / 2016
The Fehmarn Belt is a strait between Denmark and Germany, currently served by a ferry. This note analyses the theory of competition between the ferry and a planned tunnel, the Fehmarn Belt Fixed Link. The model is an asymmetric duopoly and addresses two questions: 1. Will the tunnel induce the ferry to exit the market, once it operates? 2. Will the tunnel's toll revenue suffice to cover its cost? To ...
2016| Rafael Aigner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1538 / 2015
The wage curve introduced by Blanchflower and Oswald (1990, 1994) postulates a negative correlation between wages and unemployment. Empirical results focus on particular theoretical channels establishing the relationship. Panel models mostly draw on unionized bargaining or the efficiency wage hypothesis. Spatial econometric approaches can be rationalized by monopsonistic competition. However, the approaches ...
2015| Reinhold Kosfeld, Christian Dreger
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DIW Discussion Papers 1537 / 2015
This paper investigates the role of food self-provisioning for the intake of macro- and micronutrients of households in Mongolia. Our analysis is based on rich household survey data that collected food consumption through consumption diaries. We analyze nutritional outcomes within and across the three prevalent Mongolian livelihoods that derive food from different sources: urban wave employees, rural ...
2015| Katharina Lehmann-Uschner, Kati Krähnert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1536 / 2015
Using the 2007 Mannheim innovation survey, we investigate whether family firms are more financially constrained than other firms and how this affects both innovation input as well as innovation outcomes such as market and firm novelties or process innovations. Based on the CDM framework, estimation of the recursive system of equations shows that family businesses are more likely to be constrained and ...
2015| Dorothea Schäfer, Andreas Stephan, Jenniffer Solórzano Mosquera
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DIW Discussion Papers 1535 / 2015
Crowding on public transport (PT) is a major issue for commuters around the world. Nevertheless, economists have rarely investigated the causes of crowding discomfort. Furthermore, most evidence on the costs of PT crowding is based on contingent valuation studies. First, this paper assesses discomfort with PT crowding over different density levels, trip durations and across different individuals using ...
2015| Luke Haywood, Martin Koning, Guillaume Monchambert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1534 / 2015
This paper analyzes the short- and long-term impact of extreme weather events on educational outcomes in Mongolia. Our focus is on two extremely severe winters that caused mass livestock mortality. We use household panel data with comprehensive retrospective information on households’ historic experience with weather shocks. Exposure to the weather shock significantly reduces the likelihood of being ...
2015| Valeria Groppo, Kati Krähnert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1533 / 2015
Open access means that research outputs, such as articles and data, are free of restrictions on access and free of restrictions on use. In the light of recent market developments in academic publishing, we argue in this essay that the discourse about open access must include a discussion about research infrastructure and innovation in academic publishing.
2015| Benedikt Fecher, Gert G. Wagner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1532 / 2015
The study focuses on the question of whether productivity estimates are biased due to the emergence of a new input that is usually omitted: temporary agency worker (TAW). The study analyzes labor productivity and TFP by means of a structural approach using a representative dataset of German manufacturing firms. The empirical results show, once TAW is taken into account, that: i) labor productivity ...
2015| Alexander Schiersch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1531 / 2015
This paper, which is one of the first to estimate productivity in retail electricity for a European country after liberalisation, analyses the effect of ownership and governance structure by using a unique dataset of German electricity retailers from 2003 to 2012. An innovative service production function for the retail sector is derived with labour and external services as the main inputs. A structural ...
2015| Caroline Stiel, Astrid Cullmann, Maria Nieswand
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DIW Discussion Papers 1530 / 2015
The paper aims at measuring the rental housing market regulations in Germany between 1913 and 2015. Four classes of housing policy are considered: Rent controls, tenant protection, rationing of housing, and fostering of social housing. Based on a thorough analysis of federal and regional legislation, for each class, an index is constructed, increasing in degree of regulation. The average of class-specific ...
2015| Konstantin A. Kholodilin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1529 / 2015
The interconnection among different choices by the same decision-maker is fairly well established in the literature. Along this line, this paper aims to identify how preferences for electromobility are affected by mode choices for regular trips. With this purpose in mind, a framework based on person- and alternative-specific error components (covariances) is proposed. The method aims to include individual-specific ...
2015| Francisco J. Bahamonde-Birke
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DIW Discussion Papers 1528 / 2015
This paper addresses the continuity of attitudinal and perceptual indicators in hybrid discrete choice models and the main objective of this work is to compare the consequences of treating the indicators as continuous or ordinal outcomes, given different assumptions about the way in which these are stated. Based on tradition and for computational reasons, such indicators are predominantly treated as ...
2015| Francisco J. Bahamonde-Birke, Juan de Dios Ortúzar