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DIW Discussion Papers 1214 / 2012
This paper derives a new effect of trade liberalisation on the quality of the environment. We show that in the presence of heterogeneous firms the aggregate volume of emissions is influenced not only by the long-established scale effect, but also by a reallocation effect resulting from an increase in the relative size of more productive firms. We show how the relative importance of these effects, and ...
2012| Udo Kreickemeier, Philipp M. Richter
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DIW Discussion Papers 1213 / 2012
In this paper I investigate the causal returns to education for different educational groups in Germany by employing a new method by Klein and Vella (2010) that bases identification on the presence of conditional heteroskedasticity. Compared to IV methods, key advantages of this approach are unbiased estimates in the absence of instruments and parameter interpretation that is not bounded to local average ...
2012| Nils Saniter
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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 1184 / 2012
Based on representative data, the German Micro-Census, we provide an overview of the development of self-employment and entrepreneurship in Germany between 1991 and 2010, the first two decades after reunification. We investigate the socioeconomic background of these individuals, their education, previous employment status, and their income level. We observe a unique increase in self-employment in Germany ...
2012| Michael Fritsch, Alexander S. Kritikos, Alina Rusakova
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DIW Discussion Papers 1179 / 2011
This paper investigates whether self-employed households use consumer loans - in particular instalment loans and overdrafts - to finance business activities. Controlling for financial and non-financial household variables we show that self-employed households particularly use personal overdrafts significantly more often than employee households. When analyzing the correlation between consumer loan ...
2011| Christoph Kneiding, Alexander S. Kritikos
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DIW Discussion Papers 1172 / 2011
In this paper a mixed-frequency VAR à la Mariano & Murasawa (2004) with Markov regime switching in the parameters is estimated by Bayesian inference. Unlike earlier studies, that used the pseuo-EM algorithm of Dempster, Laird & Rubin (1977) to estimate the model, this paper describes how to make use of recent advances in Bayesian inference on mixture models. This way, one is able to surmount some well-known ...
2011| Paul Viefers
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DIW Discussion Papers 1166 / 2011
Integrating large quantities of supply-driven renewable electricity generation remains a political and operational challenge. One of the main obstacles in Europe to installing at least 200 GWs of power from variable renewable sources is how to deal with the insufficient network capacity and the congestion that will result from new flow patterns. We model the current methodology for controlling congestion ...
2011| Karsten Neuhoff, Rodney Boyd, Thilo Grau, Julian Barquin, Francisco Echavarren, Janusz Bialek, Chris Dent, Christian von Hirschhausen, Benjamin Hobbs, Friedrich Kunz, Hannes Weigt, Christian Nabe, Georgios Papaefthymiou, Christoph Weber
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DIW Discussion Papers 1162 / 2011
EU Member States increase deployment of intermittent renewable energy sources to deliver the 20% renewable target formulated in the European Renewables Directive of 2008. To incorporate these intermittent sources, a power market needs to be flexible enough to accommodate short-term forecasts and quick turn transactions. This flexibility is particularly valuable with respect to wind energy, where wind ...
2011| Frieder Borggrefe, Karsten Neuhoff
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DIW Discussion Papers 1161 / 2011
EU Member States are pursuing large scale investment in renewable generation in order to meet a 2020 target to source 20% of total energy sources by renewables. As the location for this new generation differs from the location of existing generation sources, and is often on the extremities of the electricity network, it will create new flow patterns and transmission needs. While congestion exists between ...
2011| Karsten Neuhoff, Benjamin F. Hobbs, David Newbery
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DIW Discussion Papers 1160 / 2011
This paper documents the magnitude, pattern, and evolution of lifetime earnings inequality in Germany. Based on a large sample of earning biographies from social security records, we show that the intra-generational distribution of lifetime earnings of male workers has a Gini coefficient around .2 for cohorts born in the late 1930s and early 1940s; this amounts to about 2/3 of the value of the Gini ...
2011| Timm Bönke, Giacomo Corneo, Holger Lüthen