-
DIW Discussion Papers 1427 / 2014
The Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS) provides information about household wealth (real and financial assets as well as liabilities) from 15 Euro‐countries after the financial crisis of 2007/8. The survey will be the central dataset in this topic in the future. However, several aspects point to potential methodological constraints regarding crosscountry comparability. Therefore the aim ...
2014| Anita Tiefensee, Markus M. Grabka
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1426 / 2014
In this paper, we analyze the technical efficiency of CO2 reduction potentials of German power and heat plants, using a non-parametric sequential Data Envelopment Analysis. We apply a metafrontier framework to evaluate plant-level efficiencies in the transformation of inputs into desirable (energy) and undesirable (CO2 emissions) outputs, taking into account different fossil fuel generation technologies. ...
2014| Stefan Seifert, Astrid Cullmann, Christian von Hirschhausen
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1425 / 2014
Based on representative micro data for Germany, we compare the incomes of self-employed with those of wage workers. Our results show that the median self-employed entrepreneur with employees earns significantly more than the median salaried employee, while the median solo entrepreneur earns less. However, solo entrepreneurship pays for those with a university entrance degree but no further professional ...
2014| Alina Sorgner, Michael Fritsch, Alexander Kritikos
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1424 / 2014
Local business profits respond to local business tax (LBT) rates that vary across municipalities. We estimate that a one percent increase in the LBT rate decreases the LBT base by 0.45 percent, based on the universe of German LBT return files, which include corporations and unincorporated businesses. However, the fiscal equalization scheme largely compensates municipalities for the loss in the LBT ...
2014| Frank M. Fossen, Viktor Steiner
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1423 / 2014
This paper examines short-term price reactions after one-day abnormal price changes and whether they create exploitable profit opportunities in various financial markets. A t-test confirms the presence of overreactions and also suggests that there is an “inertia anomaly”, i.e. after an overreaction day prices tend to move in the same direction for some time. A trading robot approach is then used to ...
2014| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis Gil-Alana, Alex Plastun
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1422 / 2014
Developed and well regulated financial markets are usually seen as a precondition for an efficient allocation of resources and can foster long term economic growth. This paper explores the institutional determinants for financial development in the countries of the Middle East and North African (MENA) region. Institutional conditions are from the International Country Risk Guide. Paneleconometric techniques ...
2014| Mondher Cherif, Christian Dreger
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1421 / 2014
In Germany, individuals in need of long-term care receive support through benefits of the long-term care insurance. A central goal of the insurance is to support informal care provided by family members. Care recipients can choose between benefits in kind (formal home care services) and benefits in cash. From a budgetary perspective family care is a cost-saving alternative to formal home care and to ...
2014| Johannes Geyer, Thorben Korfhage
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1420 / 2014
This paper investigates the causal impact of displacement on health outcomes for Colombian children of different age cohorts. It uses the Colombian Demographic and Health Survey 2010, which provides both a number of health outcomes and information about displacement of households. Two different empirical strategies are employed to identify the impact of displacement on child health, namely a linear ...
2014| Nina Wald
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1419 / 2014
Motivated by Manski and Tamer (2002) and especially their partial identification analysis of the regression model where one covariate is only interval-measured, we present two extensions. Manski and Tamer (2002) propose two estimation approaches in this context, focussing on general results. The modified minimum distance (MMD) estimates the true identified set and the modified method of moments (MMM) ...
2014| Daniel Cerquera, François Laisney, Hannes Ullrich
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1418 / 2014
A shift from zonal pricing to smaller zones and nodal pricing improves efficiency and security of system operation. Resulting price changes do however also shift profits and surplus between and across generation and load. As individual actorscan lose, they might oppose any reform. We explore how free allocation of financial transmission rights to generation and load can be used to mitigate the distributional ...
2014| Friedrich Kunz, Karsten Neuhoff, Juan Rosellón
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1417 / 2014
The surge in the German house prices starting in 2010 raised fears about the emergence of a speculative bubble. Given a local nature of housing markets, it is not clear to what extent the bubble, if any, is spread across different cities. In this paper, we test for speculative house price bubbles in 127 large German cities over the last 20 years. Along with testing bubbles for each city separately, ...
2014| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Claus Michelsen, Dirk Ulbricht
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1416 / 2014
Deviations of policy interest rates from the levels implied by the Taylor rule have been persistent before the financial crisis and increased especially after the turn of the century. Compared to the Taylor benchmark, policy rates were often too low. This paper provides evidence that both international spillovers, for instance international dependencies in the interest rate setting of central banks, ...
2014| Joscha Beckmann, Ansgar Belke, Christian Dreger
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1415 / 2014
In January 2013 the interurban passenger transport market in Germany was liberalized and several coach carriers emerged offering an alternative to the Deutsche Bahn, a state owned rail monopoly. The coach carriers have attempted to position themselves not just through lower prices but also through product differentiation, for example marketing their services as the most ecological way to travel. Hence, ...
2014| Francisco J. Bahamonde-Birke, Uwe Kunert, Heike Link, Juan de Dios Ortúzar
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1414 / 2014
This paper presents a revised version of the DIW Economic Barometer, the business cycle index of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin). As in earlier versions, we put forward a factor model on a monthly frequency to filter the latent state of the aggregate economy. In the new version, the resulting business cycle factor is based on more than 300 variables. The main methodological ...
2014| Paul Viefers, Ferdinand Fichtner, Simon Junker, Maximilian Podstawski
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1413 / 2014
This paper analyses the effects of newspaper coverage of macro news on the spread between the yield on the 10-year German Bund and on sovereign bonds in eight countries belonging to the euro area (Belgium, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain) using daily data for the period 1999-2014. The econometric analysis is based on the estimation of a VAR-GARCH model. The results ...
2014| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Fabio Spagnolo, Nicola Spagnolo
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1412 / 2014
The use of log-transformed data has become standard in macroeconomic forecasting with VAR models. However, its appropriateness in the context of out-of-sample forecasts has not yet been exposed to a thorough empirical investigation. With the aim of filling this void, a broad sample of VAR models is employed in a multi-country set up and approximately 42 Mio. pseudo-out-of-sample forecasts of GDP are ...
2014| Johannes Mayr, Dirk Ulbricht
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1411 / 2014
The paper analyzes the effects of changes to regulatory policy and to monetary policy on cross-border bank lending since the global financial crisis. Cross-border bank lending has decreased, and the home bias in the credit portfolio of banks has risen sharply, especially among banks in the euro area. Our results suggest that expansionary monetary policy in the source countries – as measured by the ...
2014| Franziska Bremus, Marcel Fratzscher
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1410 / 2014
The energy efficiency of the residential housing stock plays a key role in strategies to mitigate climate change and global warming. In this context, it is frequently argued that private investment and the quality of thermal upgrades is too low in the light of the challenges faced and the potential energy cost savings. While many authors address the potential barriers for investors to increase energy ...
2014| Claus Michelsen, Sebastian Rosenschon, Christian Schulz
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1409 / 2014
This paper provides new evidence on the contribution of local banking to local economic growth (i.e. at county level – the Italian “province”) in Italy. A comprehensive dataset is used, which includes control variables for social capital and human capital as well as indicators of the quality of local infrastructures and the production structure of the local economy. A linear within-estimator technique ...
2014| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Stefano Di Colli, Roberto Di Salvo, Juan Sergio Lopez
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1408 / 2014
Considering a vertical structure with perfectly competitive upstream firms that deliver a homogenous good to a differentiated retail duopoly, we show that upstream fixed costs may help to monopolize the downstream market. We find that downstream prices increase in upstream firms’ fixed costs when both intra- and interbrand competition exist. Our findings contradict the common wisdom that fixed costs ...
2014| Stéphane Caprice, Vanessa von Schlippenbach, Christian Wey