Core office days and hygiene concept
Core office days and hygiene concept from Reint Gropp, November 22, 2022 IWH Hygiene Concept, as of Nov 1, 2022 (PDF, 110 kB) Dear colleagues, In the attachment, I am sending you…
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IWH Retreat Kick-off
IWH Retreat: Kick-off Meeting from Oliver Holtemöller, April 19, 2022 Dear all, On 08 and 09 June 2022, our retreat at Schwielowsee near Potsdam will take place. The motto is…
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Competition and Moral Behavior: A Meta-Analysis of Forty-Five Crowd-Sourced Experimental Designs
Anna Dreber, Felix Holzmeister, Sabrina Jeworrek, Magnus Johannesson, Joschka Waibel, Utz Weitzel, et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS),
No. 23,
2023
Abstract
Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental research protocols. To provide further evidence on whether competition affects moral behavior and to examine whether the generalizability of a single experimental study is jeopardized by design heterogeneity, we invited independent research teams to contribute experimental designs to a crowd-sourced project. In a large-scale online data collection, 18,123 experimental participants were randomly allocated to 45 randomly selected experimental designs out of 95 submitted designs. We find a small adverse effect of competition on moral behavior in a meta-analysis of the pooled data. The crowd-sourced design of our study allows for a clean identification and estimation of the variation in effect sizes above and beyond what could be expected due to sampling variance. We find substantial design heterogeneity—estimated to be about 1.6 times as large as the average standard error of effect size estimates of the 45 research designs—indicating that the informativeness and generalizability of results based on a single experimental design are limited. Drawing strong conclusions about the underlying hypotheses in the presence of substantive design heterogeneity requires moving toward much larger data collections on various experimental designs testing the same hypothesis.
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23.05.2023 • 14/2023
Analysis of earnings calls: Blathering managers harm their company
If a senior executive refuses to give information to professional investors, the company's stock market value drops afterwards. This is shown in a study by the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) after evaluating
1.2 million answers from tele-phone conferences.
Fabian Wöbbeking
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05.04.2023 • 9/2023
East German economy has come through energy crisis well so far – Implications of the Joint Economic Forecast Spring 2023 and new data for the East German economy
In 2022, the East German economy expanded by 3.0%, significantly stronger than the economy in West Germany (1.5%). The background is a more robust development of labour and retirement incomes. For 2023, the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) forecasts a higher GDP growth rate of 1% in East Germany than in Germany as a whole (0.3%). The unemployment rate is expected to stagnate, with 6.8% in 2023 and 6.7% in the following year.
Oliver Holtemöller
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05.04.2023 • 8/2023
Stubborn Core Inflation – Time for Supply Side Policies
The leading economic research institutes have raised their forecast for growth in German economic output in the current year to 0.3%. In the fall, they were still expecting a decline of 0.4%. “The economic setback in the winter half-year 2022/2023 is likely to have been less severe than feared in the fall. The main reason for this is a smaller loss of purchasing power as a result of a significant drop in energy prices,” says Timo Wollmershäuser, Head of Forecasts at ifo. Nevertheless, the rate of inflation will fall only slowly from 6.9% last year to 6.0% this year.
Oliver Holtemöller
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02.02.2023 • 2/2023
Economic growth, public finances and greenhouse gas emissions in the medium term
According to the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) and its medium-term projection of the German economy, growth in the next six years will be about the same as in the past six years, at 1% per year. The national budget will remain in deficit, but the debt level will decline again relative to the gross domestic product (GDP) from 2024 onwards. At this rate of economic expansion, greenhouse gas emissions will continue to decline in the medium term, but at a much slower rate than necessary to meet the national emission reduction targets.
Oliver Holtemöller
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Physical Climate Change and the Sovereign Risk of Emerging Economies
Hannes Böhm
Journal of Economic Structures,
2022
Abstract
I show that rising temperatures can detrimentally affect the sovereign creditworthiness of emerging economies. To this end, I collect long-term monthly temperature data of 54 emerging markets. I calculate a country’s temperature deviation from its historical average, which approximates present-day climate change trends. Running regressions from 1994m1 to 2018m12, I find that higher temperature anomalies lower sovereign bond performances (i.e., increase sovereign risk) significantly for countries that are warmer on average and have lower seasonality. The estimated magnitudes suggest that affected countries likely face significant increases in their sovereign borrowing costs if temperatures continue to rise due to climate change. However, results indicate that stronger institutions can make a country more resilient towards temperature shocks, which holds independent of a country’s climate.
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30.11.2022 • 28/2022
Stricter rules for banks can relieve real estate markets
Exuberant price levels in the German real estate market could further exacerbate an economic crisis. Fiscal instruments exert too little influence to contain this danger, shows a study by the Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH).
Michael Koetter
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Real Estate Transaction Taxes and Credit Supply
Michael Koetter, Philipp Marek, Antonios Mavropoulos
IWH Discussion Papers,
No. 26,
2022
Abstract
We exploit staggered real estate transaction tax (RETT) hikes across German states to identify the effect of house price changes on mortgage credit supply. Based on approximately 33 million real estate online listings, we construct a quarterly hedonic house price index (HPI) between 2008:q1 and 2017:q4, which we instrument with state-specific RETT changes to isolate the effect on mortgage credit supply by all local German banks. First, a RETT hike by one percentage point reduces HPI by 1.2%. This effect is driven by listings in rural regions. Second, a 1% contraction of HPI induced by an increase in the RETT leads to a 1.4% decline in mortgage lending. This transmission of fiscal policy to mortgage credit supply is effective across almost the entire bank capitalization distribution.
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