Firms with superior productivity, labeled superstar firms, are argued to be the link between rising concentration and the fall of the aggregate labor share in the US. This analysis confirms that similar evidence is found within the European context: the market share and firm size increase, whereas the labor share decreases with productivity. One of the much discussed mechanisms behind this development ...
There was a significant increase in the number of women on executive boards of large companies in Germany from 2020 to 2021 after years of slow progress: In fall 2021, there were 139 women on the executive boards of the 200 largest companies, 38 more than in 2020. This is an increase of a good three percentage points to almost 15 percent, the largest seen since the beginning of the DIW Berlin Women ...
This second report in the DIW Berlin Women Executives Barometer 2022 explores the designs and effects of gender quotas across Europe, coming to the conclusion that they are an effective instrument for increasing the share of women in top positions at large companies. Furthermore, the quotas differ greatly between the countries, for example in regard to the number of companies subject to the quota, ...
We investigate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on self-employed people’s mental health. Using representative longitudinal survey data from Germany, we reveal differential effects by gender: whereas self-employed women experienced a substantial deterioration in their mental health, self-employed men displayed no significant changes up to early 2021. Financial losses are important in explaining these ...
Steam coal exporters face increasing uncertainty about future coal demand and risks of asset stranding. Nevertheless, new export-oriented coal mine projects are still brought forward. In this study, we use the coal sector model COALMOD-World to assess the economic prospects of investments in the export-oriented steam coal sector, and in particular of coal mines in the Galilee Basin, Australia. We parameterize ...
We present first evidence how individual risk preferences shape entrepreneurial investment among the very wealthy using novel survey data from the top of the wealth distribution, which have been added to the 2019 German Socio-economic Panel Study. The data include private wealth balance sheets, in particular the value of own private business assets, and a standard measure of risk tolerance. We find that ...
Over the past years, the proportion of women on the supervisory boards of major companies in Germany has increased. As this second report in the DIW Women Executives Barometer 2021 shows, this has a meaningful, positive impact on the supervisory boards of many companies, and affects interactions between members, discussions, and decision-making. These findings are based on qualitative interviews with ...
We study a game in which two firms compete in quality to serve a market consisting of consumers with different initial consideration sets. If both firms invest below a certain threshold, they only compete for those consumers already aware of their existence. Above this threshold, a firm is visible to all and the highest investment attracts all consumers. On the one hand, the existence of initially ...