Newsletter May 2018

On 14 and 15 May 2018, around 70 national and international energy experts attended the seventh Mannheim Energy Conference at ZEW. Over the course of the two-day event, researchers and experts from companies and international organisations discussed various topics related to the energy economy. Organised jointly by ZEW and the Mannheim Centre for Competition and Innovation (MaCCI), the conference focused particularly on topics like energy efficiency, energy innovations as well as CO2 emissions and emissions trading schemes.

The economy is in good shape when it is in balance. But if the economy is not in balance, does that mean it’s in trouble? What effect does a balanced or unbalanced economy have on private households, firms or the country as a whole? And how do we know when the economy is in balance? These are some of the questions addressed by ZEW President Professor Achim Wambach, PhD, in a talk on what balance means for economics at the 30th Heidelberg Symposium on 24 May 2018.

In January of 1993 Europe officially began its experiment with a common market. Now, 25 years later, we can say with certainty that it’s been a resounding success. Accounting for more than 500 million consumers, the European Union (EU) represents the world’s largest economic region. In 2017, it made up 16.5 per cent of global GDP, with a significant potential for growth going forward.

Women are less willing to take financial risks on the capital market than men. However, this is not because of their gender, but rather their attitude towards risk. In cases where individuals exhibit a similar willingness to take risks, the role of gender becomes insignificant. These are the main findings of a study conducted by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Mannheim, involving the analysis of a representative survey of just under 4,500 private households in Germany. The Panel on Household Finances is conducted regularly by the Deutsche Bundesbank. An analysis of customer data carried out by the ING-DiBa produced similar findings.

How do current political developments shape our actions? What are the challenges of internationalisation? And how can science and research support policymakers? These were just some of the questions addressed by prominent experts from the worlds of politics, economics and research in a podium discussion on 17 May 2018. The networking event “Politics and Academia – Tackling International Challenges Together” was organised by the competence centre Baden-Württemberg International (bw-i), with ZEW President Professor Achim Wambach, PhD, providing the economic perspective on a panel of experts.

On 23 and 24 April 2018, the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) and the Collaborative Research Center SFB 884 “Political Economy of Reforms” jointly organised the annual ZEW Public Finance Conference. Over the course of the conference, around 80 participants were offered a varied programme which featured numerous presentations on recent research findings from all areas of public economics and political economy. During this year’s conference, special emphasis was placed on theoretical and empirical research on the coordination of fiscal policies in the European Monetary Union (EMU).

The Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) and the Institute for Social Research and Social Economy (iso) conducted a study on the opportunities and challenges that come with increasing digitalisation and the way they influence work in Luxembourg. The study was commissioned by the Ministry of Labour, Employment and the Social and the Solidarity Economy, the Chamber of Commerce and the Chambre des Salariés in Luxembourg. On 4 May 2018, ZEW and iso presented the study “Arbeiten 4.0 – Chancen und Herausforderungen für Luxemburg” (Labour 4.0 – Opportunities and Challenges for Luxembourg)

in the presence of Nicolas Schmit, Luxembourg Minister for Labour, Employment and the Social and the Solidarity Economy. Professor Dr. Irene Bertschek (on the left in the photo), head of the ZEW Research Department “Digital Economy”, represented the institute at the event.

ZEW has sealed its cooperation with the Vietnamese IDJ Academy of Innovation and Startups by signing a memorandum of understanding in Mannheim. The memorandum, which was signed by Tran Trong Hieu, chairman of the IDJ Group (Invest to Develop Jointly) and founder of the IDJ Academy, and ZEW Director Thomas Kohl, involves the introduction of further training programmes for Vietnamese managers at ZEW. It has furthermore laid the foundation for an exclusive partnership between the IDJ Group and the ZEW Service Department “Knowledge Transfer and Qualification Programmes”.

How can we pave the way for an ecologically and socially sustainable society in a way that also makes economic sense? How should this transformation of our society be implemented? How can those involved support these transformation processes and encourage acceptance of them? These are some of the questions that were addressed in a presentation by ZEW environmental economists at the side event “Towards an Integrated Assessment of Economic, Social and Technological Green Transformation Pathways” on 7 May 2018 at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conference (SB48) in Bonn.

From 9 April to 4 May 2018, the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) played host to a group of managers from Vietnam attending the manager training programme “Fit for Partnership with Germany”. 21 managers from companies in various sectors of the Vietnamese economy took part in the training programme whilst fostering new and existing contacts with German businesses.

The current debate over the reform of the European Union has come to a head. The European Commission has proposed creating the office of a European Economy and Finance Minister with the aim of streamlining the many complex and fragmented decision-making processes within the European Monetary Union. This and other proposals would, however, likely require the EU Member States to relinquish further sovereignty rights to the EU. How can these reform plans be successfully implemented and what will the Eurozone look like in the future? Does the idea of a European Finance Minister have potential and what obstacles might stand in its way?

These are just a few of the questions addressed at the ZEW Lunch Debate “Reforming the Eurozone: Prospects and Challenges”, an event organised by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Mannheim, in collaboration with the research network EconPol Europe. The event, held on 2 May 2018 at the Representation of the State of Baden-Württemberg to the European Union in Brussels, brought together experts from the worlds of politics and research to discuss this pressing issue facing Europe.

Bundesbank boss Dr. Jens Weidmann recently gave a lecture at ZEW on “Communication as a Monetary Policy Tool for Central Banks”. ZEW President Professor Achim Wambach, PhD, had the pleasure of welcoming over 200 guests to the event, which was part of the lecture series “First-Hand Information on Economic Policy”.
 
To the event video

The Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) hosts the fourth international annual MaTax Conference on taxation research on 4 and 5 October 2018. The conference is organised by the Leibniz ScienceCampus MannheimTaxation (MaTax), a joint initiative of the University of Mannheim and ZEW. We invite submissions on all topics broadly related to tax research, including papers from the fields of economics, law, political science, and other disciplines as well as interdisciplinary contributions. The conference focuses particularly on applied and empirical papers related to business taxation, tax avoidance and evasion, behavioural responses to taxation, tax harmonization in the European Union, political economy of taxation, international taxation, tax law, and taxation of the financial sector. Please send your paper or extended abstract to MaTax@zew.de no later than 8 June 2018.

The Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) is pleased to announce a workshop on environmental economics analyses using official firm data for Germany (AFiD), which will take place in Mannheim on 11 and 12 October 2018. Please note that the workshop will be held in German. The primary focus of the event is the presentation and discussion of new research findings from analyses in the field of environmental economics using official firm data for Germany (AFiD) from the research data centres of the statistical offices of the Länder. In addition, the event shall facilitate the exchange of information between data users and data providers. Researchers are invited to submit an abstract of 600 to 1,000 words (including bibliography) to afid@zew.de no later than 15 July 2018.

On 18 May 2018, Professor Yan Lunjiang, President of the Research Institute of Safety and Environment Technology (RISE), visited ZEW with a Chinese delegation. RISE is a Beijing-based research institute that is associated with the state-owned oil company China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC).

Adelheid Holl, PhD, is a visiting researcher in ZEW’s Research Department “Economics of Innovation and Industrial Dynamics” from 2 February to 31 July 2018. She is a research fellow at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP) in Madrid. Her research interests focus on the intersection of applied micro-economic analysis and economic geography. Here, she concentrates on productivity, the location, spatial organisation and innovation behaviour of businesses. During her stay, she will particularly concentrate on the persistence of corporate innovation in times of economic crisis.

It’s “anchors aweigh” for the MS Wissenschaft on 15 May 2018 in Berlin. This year, the Centre for European Economic Research’s (ZEW) interactive exhibit “Fit for the job market of the future” is on board as part of a tour across Germany and Austria running until early October.

The ZEW Indicator of Economic Sentiment for Germany remains unchanged in the current May survey. The indicator thus stays at a level of minus 8.2 points. The long-term average is 23.4 points. The assessment of the current economic situation in Germany slightly decreased by 0.5 points, with the corresponding indicator currently standing at 87.4 points.

According to the most recent survey for May (18/04/2018–03/05/2018), the economic outlook for China dropped by 0.3 points to a new value of minus 1.3 points. The most recent reading of the CEP indicator, which reflects the expectations of international financial market experts with regard to economic development in China over the coming twelve months, seems to suggest that the current economic situation will likely remain unchanged until well into the year 2019.

Since the turn of the 21st century, the German government has been focused on making the country’s education system more efficient and reducing the number of years children spend at the Gymnasium (high school that prepares students for university) from nine to eight (also known as the G8 reform). Since the amount of content students have to cover as part of the curriculum has not changed, this reform has led to an increase in learning intensity. This increased learning intensity has led to less equality of educational opportunity, that is, educational outcomes have become more dependent on factors over which students have no control, such as their socioeconomic background.

In the long term, equality of educational opportunity decreased relatively by around 25 per cent over the observation period. These are the findings of a recent study carried out by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) in Mannheim.

On Wednesday, the European Commission presented its much anticipated proposal for the European Union’s next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF) for the years 2021 to 2027. Stefani Weiss, a senior expert at the Bertelsmann Stiftung, and Professor Dr. Friedrich Heinemann, head of the Research Department “Corporate Taxation and Public Finance” at the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Mannheim, who have conducted a joint study on what requirements the future EU budget needs to fulfil, welcome the initiative, though are critical of how funds are being allocated.

Creating the office of “Euro Minister of Economy and Finance” will not be able to solve the main problems facing fiscal coordination in Europe. This is the finding of a recent study conducted by a European team in the EconPol Europe research network and coordinated by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Mannheim. The study was presented at the "ZEW Lunch Debates on “Reforming the Eurozone: Prospects and Challenges” in Brussels.

Progress towards gender equality on the German labour market has been slow, with women still being under-represented in management positions and feeling less supported by their employers than their male counterparts. Nevertheless, German women on average exhibited the same level of satisfaction with their job and salary as men. These are the findings of a recent monitoring report on equal opportunities for men and women in the workplace conducted by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Mannheim, in collaboration with the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), on behalf of the German Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the European banking sector have stagnated at well below pre-financial crisis levels. While M&A transactions totalled 116 billion euros in 2006 and 91 billion euros in 2007, transaction volumes have plummeted to a mere three billion euros in 2017. These are the findings of recent calculations carried out by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Mannheim, on the basis of the Zephyr database of Bureau van Dijk.

German companies are increasingly becoming the target of Chinese investors, who have been buying German companies with high-tech expertise for a good two years now. While in 2009 only two German firms were bought by Chinese companies, the number of Chinese acquisitions reached 21 in 2016 and 20 in 2017 – a tenfold increase in M&A activities. In the past two years the transaction volume also rose considerably, reaching a record level of five billion euros in 2017. These are the findings of recent studies carried out by the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), Mannheim, on the basis of the Zephyr database of Bureau van Dijk.

Our publications are available to download in PDF format. PDF files can be viewed using, among others, Acrobat Reader, which you can download for free at https://acrobat. adobe. com/us/en/acrobat/pdf-reader. html

Thushyanthan Baskaran; Sebastian Blesse
Subnational Border Reforms and Economic Development in Africa

Frederik Eidam
Gap-Filling Government Debt Maturity Choice

Dominik Rehse; Ryan Riordan; Nico Rottke; Joachim Zietz
The Effects of Uncertainty on Market Liquidity: Evidence from Hurricane Sandy

Kathrin Borchert; Matthias Hirth; Michael Kummer; Ulrich Laitenberger; Olga Slivkó; Steffen Viete
Unemployment and Online Labor

Frank Pothen; Miguel Angel Tovar Reaños
The Distribution of Material Footprints in Germany

Sebastian Camarero Garcia
Inequality of Educational Opportunities and the Role of Learning Intensity: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Germany

Irene Bertschek und Wolfgang Briglauer
Wie die Digitale Transformation der Wirtschaft gelingt (How the Digital Transformation of the Economy Can Be Successful)

Thomas Fetzer
Bausteine für einen sektorenübergreifenden institutionellen Ordnungsrahmen für die Digitale Wirtschaft (Components for a Cross-Sectoral Institutional Framework for the Digital Economy)

Irene Bertschek, Daniel Arnold, Daniel Erdsiek, Katharina Nicolay, Daniel Bieber and Elena Kreutzer
Arbeiten 4.0 – Chancen und Herausforderungen für Luxemburg (Labour 4.0 – Opportunities and Challenges for Luxembourg)

Innovation Indicators for the Chemical Industry 2018

Analysis of Economic Data for the Cluster ICT, Media, Cultural Economy 2018

Speaker: Prof. Peter Kuhn, PhD (University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB))
Location of the event: ZEW, Mannheim

Speaker: Prof. Johanna Mollerstrom, PhD (Humboldt University of Berlin and German Institute for Economic Research (DIW))
Location of the event: ZEW, Mannheim

Location of the event: Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, Berlin

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Jörn Grahl (University of Cologne)
Location of the event: ZEW, Mannheim

Location of the event: ZEW, Mannheim

Location of the event: ZEW, Mannheim

Speaker: Byron Lutz, PhD (Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Washington, DC)
Location of the event: ZEW, Mannheim

Location of the event: ZEW, Mannheim

Location of the event: ZEW, Mannheim

Speaker: Prof. Daniel S. Hamermesh, PhD (University of Texas at Austin)
Location of the event: ZEW, Mannheim

Location of the event: ZEW, Mannheim

Location of the event: ZEW, Mannheim

Picture Credits: news article of 25 May 2018: ZEW/HCWK, news article of 22 May 2018: bw-i, news article of 15 May 2018: Department of Labor Luxembourg, news article of 9 May 2018: iStock.com/kodda, press release of 7 May 2018: iStock.com/co Imgorthand, news article of 4 May 2018: Felix Kindermann, press release of 2 May 2018: iStock.com/VanderWolf-Images, press release of 30 April 2018: iStock.com/PeopleImages, press release of 30 April 2018: iStock.com/jpique
 
All further pictures: ©ZEW