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DIW Discussion Papers 1206 / 2012
The paper analyzes the gender pay gap in private-sector management positions based on German panel data and using fixed-effects models. It deals with the effect of occupational sex segregation on wages, and the extent to which wage penalties for managers in predominantly female occupations are moderated by firm size. Drawing on economic and organizational approaches and the devaluation of women's work, ...
2012| Anne Busch, Elke Holst
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DIW Discussion Papers 1205 / 2012
This paper estimates the effect of political power on tax policies in municipal councils under a proportional election system. The main challenge in estimating the causal effect of parties on policy is to isolate the effect of power from underlying voter preferences and the selection effect of parties. We use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in ...
2012| Ronny Freier, Christian Odendahl
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DIW Discussion Papers 1204 / 2012
The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of revenue decentralization on the provision of infrastructure at the sub-national level. We estimate the effects of revenue decentralization and earmarked grant financing on the level of sub-national infrastructure investment in 20 European countries over the period 1990-2009. The results are interpreted in light of the predictions of the theory on fiscal ...
2012| Andreas Kappeler, Albert Solé-Ollé, Andreas Stephan, Timo Välilä
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DIW Discussion Papers 1203 / 2012
A non-linear model is applied where suddenly strong spurts of exports occur when changes of the exchange rate go beyond a zone of inaction. We call the latter a "play" area - analogous to mechanical play and implement an algorithm describing path-dependent playhysteresis into a regression framework. The hysteretic impact of real exchange rates on German exports is then estimated based on quarterly ...
2012| Ansgar Belke, Matthias Göcke, Martin Günther
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DIW Discussion Papers 1202 / 2012
This paper analyzes the necessary local conditions required for the existence of positive spillovers from multinationals' entry and it consists of a unified study of absorptive capacities. We start from the idea that FDI speeds up the diffusion of technologies across countries. Yet, the question that arises is: to what extent are these advanced technologies absorbed and successfully internalized by ...
2012| Beatrice Farkas
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DIW Discussion Papers 1201 / 2012
Can cash transfers promote employment and reduce poverty in rural Africa? Will lower youth unemployment and poverty reduce the risk of social instability? We experimentally evaluate one of Uganda's largest development programs, which provided thousands of young people nearly unconditional, unsupervised cash transfers to pay for vocational training, tools, and business start-up costs. Mid-term results ...
2012| Christopher Blattman, Nathan Fiala, Sebastian Martinez
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DIW Discussion Papers 1200 / 2012
This paper analyses monthly hours worked in the US over the sample period 1939m1 - 2011m10 using a cyclical long memory model; this is based on Gegenbauer processes and characterised by autocorrelations decaying to zero cyclically and at a hyperbolic rate along with a spectral density that is unbounded at a non-zero frequency. The reason for choosing this specification is that the periodogram of the ...
2012| Guglielmo Maria Caporale, Luis A. Gil-Alana
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DIW Discussion Papers 1199 / 2012
This paper investigates the relationship between global liquidity and commodity and food prices applying a global cointegrated vector-autoregressive model. We use different measures of global liquidity and various indices of commodity and food prices for the period 1980-2011. Our results support the hypothesis that there is a positive long-run relation between global liquidity and the development of ...
2012| Ansgar Belke, Ingo G. Bordon, Ulrich Volz
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DIW Discussion Papers 1198 / 2012
We argue that a financial transaction tax complements financial market regulation. With the tax, governments have an additional instrument at hand to influence trading activity. FTT aims to reduce regulatory arbitrage, flash trading, overactive portfolio management, excessive leverage and speculative transactions of financial institutions. The focus clearly addresses these classes of activities that ...
2012| Dorothea Schäfer
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DIW Discussion Papers 1197 / 2012
The paper explores factors that influence the household decision to leave internal displacement camps in the immediate aftermath of violent conflict. Our analysis is based on two sources of information: household survey data collected in northern Uganda for households that were displaced by the civil conflict, and geo-referenced data on armed conflict events, with which we construct our developed index ...
2012| Carlos Bozzoli, Tilman Brück, Tony Muhumuza
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DIW Discussion Papers 1196 / 2012
In the European Emission Trading scheme the supply of allowances exceeds emissions - cumulating, according to our estimates, in a surplus of 2.7 billion tonnes by 2013/2014. We find that initially the surplus was acquired by power companies so as to hedge future carbon costs. As the surplus exceeds this hedging demand, additional allowances need to be acquired as speculative investment. This requires ...
2012| Karsten Neuhoff, Anne Schopp, Rodney Boyd, Kateryna Stelmakh, Alexander Vasa
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DIW Discussion Papers 1195 / 2012
Given the growing dissatisfaction with exclusion and long-run restrictions in structural vector autoregressive analysis, sign restrictions are becoming increasingly popular. So far there are no techniques for validating the shocks identified via such restrictions. Although in an ideal setting the sign restrictions specify shocks of interest, sign restrictions may be invalidated by measurement errors, ...
2012| Helmut Lütkepohl, Aleksei Netsunajev
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DIW Discussion Papers 1194 / 2012
This article investigates the understandings and perceptions of (micro)insurance among low-income people in southern Ghana, using evidence from four focus group discussions. It analyzes how the focus group participants think about various types of insurance - among them a micro life insurance product - and how their negative and/or positive evaluations have come about. The evidence indicates that (micro)insurance ...
2012| Lena Giesbert, Susan Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1193 / 2012
Empirical evidence so far found ambiguous results for the direction of effect of marginal income tax rates on employee remuneration. Based on the GSOEP data from 2002 through 2008 this study analyzes the impact of the marginal tax load on the employee side on the wage rate also allowing average tax rates and employer payroll taxes to play a role. Instrumental variable estimation based on counterfactual ...
2012| Pia Rattenhuber
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DIW Discussion Papers 1192 / 2012
Sub-Saharan Africa ranks among the top regions in terms of growth in the number of mobile phone users. The success of mobile telephony is attributed to the opening of markets for private players and lenient regulatory policy. However, markets may be increasingly saturated and new regulations introduced across Africa could also have a negative impact on future growth. Since 2006, the majority of countries ...
2012| Nicola Jentzsch
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DIW Discussion Papers 1191 / 2012
In this paper, we suggest to estimate the home rents and prices in German regions/cities using the data from Internet ads offering the housing for rent and sale. Given the richness of information contained in the ads, we are able to construct the quality-adjusted rent and price indices using the hedonic approach. The results can be applied both for investigating the dynamics of rents/prices and for ...
2012| Konstantin A. Kholodilin, Andreas Mense
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DIW Discussion Papers 1190 / 2012
Tax competition for the mobile factor capital has led to a trend in many countries to levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. In this study, we analyze the effect of such differential taxation on the debt ratio of firms. We exploit a 2009 tax reform in Germany as a quasi-experiment, which introduced a flat final withholding ...
2012| Frank M. Fossen, Martin Simmler
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DIW Discussion Papers 1189 / 2012
This paper reviews the adjustments of the feed-in tariff for new solar photovoltaics (PV) installations in Germany. As PV system prices declined rapidly over the last years, the German government implemented automatic mechanisms to adjust the support level for new installations in response to deployment volumes. This paper develops an analytic model to simulate weekly installations of PV systems ?30 ...
2012| Thilo Grau
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DIW Discussion Papers 1188 / 2012
The role and influence of the finance minister within the cabinet are discussed with increasing prominence in the recent theoretical literature on the political economy of budget deficits. It is generally assumed that the spending ministers can raise their reputation purely with new or more extensive expenditure programs, whereas solely the finance minister is interested to balance the budget. Using ...
2012| Beate R. Jochimsen, Sebastian Thomasius
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DIW Discussion Papers 1187 / 2012
The German potable water supply industry is regarded as being highly fragmented, thus inhibiting high potentials for efficiency improvements through consolidation. Focusing on a hypothetical restructuring of the industry, we apply Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to analyze the potential efficiency gains from mergers between water utilities at the county level. A conditional efficiency framework is ...
2012| Michael Zschille