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DIW Discussion Papers 1367 / 2014
We endogenize asset liquidity in a dynamic general equilibrium model with search frictions on asset markets. In the model, asset liquidity is tantamount to the ease of issuance and resaleability of private financial claims, which is driven by investors' participation on the search market. Limited resaleability of private claims creates a role for liquid assets, such as government bonds or fiat money, ...
2014| Wei Cui, Sören Radde
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DIW Discussion Papers 1366 / 2014
Parental leave and subsidized child care are prominent examples of family policies supporting the reconciliation of family life and labor market careers for mothers. In this paper, we combine different empirical strategies to evaluate the employment effects of these policies for mothers in Germany. In particular we estimate a structural labor supply model and exploit a natural experiment, i.e. the ...
2014| Johannes Geyer, Peter Haan, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1365 / 2014
This paper explores the long run relationship between public and private investment in the euro area in terms of capital stocks and gross investment flows. Panel techniques accounting for international spillovers are employed. While private and public capital stocks are cointegrated, the evidence is quite fragile for public and private investment flows. They enter a long run relationship only after ...
2014| Christian Dreger, Hans-Eggert Reimers
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DIW Discussion Papers 1364 / 2014
How do banks choose their debt maturity structure when credit markets are subject to information frictions? This paper proposes a model of equilibrium maturity choice with asymmetric information and endogenous roll-over risk. We show that in the presence of public signals about firms' creditworthiness (credit ratings), firms choose to expose themselves to positive roll-over risk in order to minimize ...
2014| Philipp König, David Pothier
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DIW Discussion Papers 1363 / 2014
This paper analyzes the trade-offs for using feed-in tariffs or tenders to remunerate different scales of solar photovoltaics (PV) projects. In recent years, European countries increasingly combined feed-in tariffs for small renewables systems with tenders for large installations. This study develops an analytic framework to quantify deployment effectiveness of responsive feed-in tariff adjustment ...
2014| Thilo Grau
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DIW Discussion Papers 1362 / 2014
A canonical two country-two good model with standard preferences does not address three classic international macroeconomic puzzles as well as two well-known asset pricing puzzles. Specifically, under financial autarky, it does not account for the high real exchange rate (RER) volatility relative to consumption volatility (RER volatility puzzle), the negative RER-consumption differentials correlation ...
2014| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Michael Donadelli, Alessia Varani
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DIW Discussion Papers 1361 / 2014
Stated survey measures of risk preferences are increasingly being used in the literature, and they have been compared to revealed risk aversion primarily by means of experiments such as lottery choice tasks. In this paper, we investigate educational choice, which involves the comparison of risky future income paths and therefore depends on risk and time preferences. In contrast to experimental settings, ...
2014| Frank M. Fossen, Daniela Glocker
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DIW Discussion Papers 1360 / 2014
In this paper, we evaluate the forecasting ability of 115 indicators to predict the housing prices and rents in 71 German cities. Above all, we are interested in whether the local business confidence indicators can allow substantially improving the forecasts, given the local nature of the real-estate markets. The forecast accuracy of different predictors is tested in a framework of a quasi out-of-sample ...
2014| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Boriss Siliverstovs
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DIW Discussion Papers 1359 / 2014
This paper discusses the type of trajectory a country's public debt path follows. In particular, a Markov switching ADF model is used to assess the sustainability of public debt by testing whether a government's present value borrowing constraint holds. Building on the work of Raybaudi et al. (2004) and Chen (2011), the model in this paper generalizes their methodology. The number of lags and states ...
2014| Anton Velinov
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DIW Discussion Papers 1358 / 2014
Through an intertemporal budget constraint, jurisdictions may gain advantages in tax and spending competition by 'competing' on debt. While the existing spatial econometric literature focuses on tax and spending competition, very little is known about spatial interaction via public debt. This paper estimates the spatial interdependence of public debt among German municipalities using a panel on municipalities ...
2014| Frank M. Fossen, Ronny Freier, Thorsten Martin
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DIW Discussion Papers 1357 / 2014
This paper investigates to what extent the R&D behavior of manufacturing companies was influenced by the 2008/09 crisis. Based on a broad official data set for German manufacturing companies, only a few companies that engaged in R&D during 2008 gave it up in the following year. Some companies even started R&D during crisis. R&D expenditures declined in 2009 compared to 2008, but expanded in 2010. The ...
2014| Alexander Eickelpasch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1356 / 2014
Long-run restrictions have been used extensively for identifying structural shocks in vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. Such restrictions are typically just-identifying but can be checked by utilizing changes in volatility. This paper reviews and contrasts the volatility models that have been used for this purpose. Three main approaches have been used, exogenously generated changes in the unconditional ...
2014| Helmut Lütkepohl, Anton Velinov
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DIW Discussion Papers 1355 / 2014
Jobs offer different wages and different non-monetary working conditions. This paper investigates how the demand for non-monetary aspects evolves over changing wealth levels. Wages do not perfectly compensate individuals for differential utility of jobs in a labour market with informational frictions. Changes in wealth may then affect preferences for different jobs. Willingness to pay for non-monetary ...
2014| Luke Haywood
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DIW Discussion Papers 1354 / 2014
In impulse response analysis estimation uncertainty is typically displayed by constructing bands around estimated impulse response functions. These bands may be based on frequentist or Bayesian methods. If they are based on the joint distribution in the Bayesian framework or the joint asymptotic distribution possibly constructed with bootstrap methods in the frequentist framework often individual confidence ...
2014| Helmut Lütkepohl, Anna Staszewska-Bystrova, Peter Winker
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DIW Discussion Papers 1353 / 2014
We analyze the role of public support in the financing pattern of R&D in German SMEs and their assessment of financing conditions in the context of other framework conditions for innovation. In Germany, there is a diversity of overall well-funded technology-neutral and technology-specific programs providing grants to R&D and innovation projects. Different types of SMEs access public funding for R&D ...
2014| Heike Belitz, Anna Lejpras
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DIW Discussion Papers 1352 / 2014
We analyze the transmission of the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009 to 415 country-industry equity portfolios. We use a factor model to predict crisis returns, defining unexplained increases in factor loadings and residual correlations as indicative of contagion. While we find evidence of contagion from the U.S. and the global financial sector, the effects are small. By contrast, there has been substantial ...
2014| Geert Bekaert, Michael Ehrmann, Marcel Fratzscher, Arnaud Mehl
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DIW Discussion Papers 1351 / 2014
Large panels of variables are used by policy makers in deciding on policy actions. Therefore it is desirable to include large information sets in models for economic analysis. In this survey methods are reviewed for accounting for the information in large sets of variables in vector autoregressive (VAR) models. This can be done by aggregating the variables or by reducing the parameter space to a manageable ...
2014| Helmut Lütkepohl
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DIW Discussion Papers 1350 / 2013
Structural identification schemes are of essential importance to vector autoregressive (VAR) analysis. This paper tests a commonly used structural parameter identification scheme to assess whether it can properly capture fundamental and non-fundamental shocks to stock prices. In particular, five related structural models, which are widely used in the literature on assessing stock price determinants ...
2013| Anton Velinov
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DIW Discussion Papers 1349 / 2013
This paper investigates the factors influencing banks' decision to engage in advanced risk management, from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective. In recent decades, credit risk management in banks has become highly sophisticated and banks have become more active and advanced in the management of credit risks. We identify two driving factors for risk management: bank competition and sector ...
2013| Dilek Bülbül, Hendrik Hakenes, Claudia Lambert
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DIW Discussion Papers 1348 / 2013
Does the mere presence of big banks affect macroeconomic outcomes? In this paper, we develop a theory of granularity (Gabaix, 2011) for the banking sector, introducing Bertrand competition and heterogeneous banks charging variable markups. Using this framework, we show conditions under which idiosyncratic shocks to bank lending can generate aggregate fluctuations in the credit supply when the banking ...
2013| Franziska Bremus, Claudia M. Buch, Katheryn N. Russ, Monika Schnitzer