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DIW Discussion Papers 1455 / 2015
Changes in residual volatility in vector autoregressive (VAR) models can be used for identifying structural shocks in a structural VAR analysis. Testable conditions are given for full identification for the case where the volatility changes can be modelled by a multivariate GARCH process. Formal statistical tests are presented for identification and their small sample properties are investigated via ...
2015| Helmut Lütkepohl, George Milunovich
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DIW Discussion Papers 1449 / 2015
Das Papier zeigt, dass die seit Jahrzehnten andauernde Klagen wissenschaftlich tätiger Ökonomen,dass Öffentlichkeit und Politik nicht genug auf Ergebnisse der ökonomischen Forschung hören,zumindest für Deutschland im Quervergleich zu anderen Wissenschaften in Bezug auf das medialeInteressen an ökonomischen Erkenntnissen nicht gerechtfertigt sind. Es wird in bemerkenswerterWeise von der Resonanz kontrastiert, ...
2015| Justus Haucap, Tobias Thomas, Gert G. Wagner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1448 / 2015
The paper analyses the empirical relationship between bank risk and sovereign credit risk in the euro area. Using structural VAR with daily financial markets data for 2003-13, the analysis confirms two-way causality between shocks to sovereign risk and bank risk, with the former being overall more important in explaining bank risk, than vice versa. The paper focuses specifically on the impact of non-standard ...
2015| Marcel Fratzscher, Malte Rieth
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DIW Discussion Papers 1447 / 2015
Germany experienced a unique rise in the level of self-employment in the first two decades following unification. Applying the non-linear Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition technique, we find that the main factors driving these changes in the overall level of self-employment are demographic developments, the shift towards service sector employment, and a larger share of population holding a tertiary degree. ...
2015| Michael Fritsch, Alexander S. Kritikos, Alina Sorgner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1439 / 2014
This paper experimentally investigates the nature of image concerns in gift giving. For this, we test variants of dictator and impunity games where the influences of social preferences on behavior are kept constant across all games. Givers maximize material payoffs by pretending to be fair when receivers do not know the actual surplus size, implying that portraying an outward appearance of norm compliance ...
2014| Alexander S. Kritikos, Jonathan H. W. Tan
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DIW Discussion Papers 1434 / 2014
Many developing countries around the world apply progressive water tariffs, often structured in the form of discretely increasing block tariffs (IBTs). These tariffs have been criticized in the welfare economic literature due to their perceived inefficiency: many of the prices charged under IBTs do not correspond to marginal costs and thus violate the principle of allocative efficiency. In this paper ...
2014| Georg Meran, Christian von Hirschhausen
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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
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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
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DIW Discussion Papers 1388 / 2014
In structural vector autoregressive analysis identifying the shocks of interest via heteroskedasticity has become a standard tool. Unfortunately, the approaches currently used for modelling heteroskedasticity all have drawbacks. For instance, assuming known dates for variance changes is often unrealistic while more exible models based on GARCH or Markov switching residuals are difficult to handle from ...
2014| Helmut Lütkepohl, Aleksei Netsunajev
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DIW Discussion Papers 1375 / 2014
This paper investigates whether there are bubbles in stock prices. We do this using a previously studied structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model claiming to distinguish fundamental and non-fundamental shocks to real stock prices. TheSVAR model relies on an identification restriction in order to correctly label the shocks. We test this restriction by means of a Markov switching-SVAR (MS-SVAR) ...
2014| Anton Velinov, Wenjuan Chen