Publikationen Prognose und Konjunkturpolitik

Die deutsche Vereinigung - ein Transferproblem

Geld und Währung in Deutschland seit der Währungsumstellung

Rising Allowances, Rising Rates: A Tinbergen Rule for Capital Taxation

The system of capital taxation consists of two instruments, namely a tax on profits and a depreciation allowance on investment. We will show in this paper that by acting on both instruments simultaneously it is possible to achieve both a growth and a fiscal net revenue target even in cases when a trade off prevails when each instrument is used individually. This is an application of the Tinbergen rule ...

The Hidden Homeownership Welfare State: An International Long-Term Perspective on the Tax Treatment of Homeowners

Welfare is traditionally understood through social security decommodifying labor markets or social investment policies. In the domain of housing, however, welfare for homeowners is largely hidden in the tax codes’ fiscal exemptions. Based on a content analysis of legislation, this paper introduces a novel yearly database of 37 countries between 1910 and 2020 to uncover the “hidden welfare state” of ...

Income Business Cycles

Using a wide variety of business cycle dating and filtering techniques, this paper documents the cyclical behavior of the post-tax income distribution in the US. First, all incomes are cyclical and co-move with the business cycle. Second, lower and higher income individuals experience significantly larger fluctuations across the business cycle than middle-income individuals. Third, these fluctuations ...

Temporary VAT Reduction during the Lockdown

This paper evaluates the temporary VAT reduction introduced by the German government over the third and fourth quarter of 2020 as most controversial part of the COVID-19 stimulus package. Critics argue that VAT reductions are ineffective because of limited pass-through of temporary measures to consumer prices and in presence of lockdown measures. Advocates emphasize positive effects on durables and ...

Two Dimensions of Political Trust in Russia

This paper analyzes two dimensions of factors of political trust in Russia. The first dimension is the target dimension (sociotropic vs. egocentric), the second dimension is the time dimension (retrospective vs. perspective). The study is based on the microdata of 2016 Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. We find a robust evidence in favor of the ...

Measuring Unmeasurable: How to Map Laws to Numbers Using Leximetrics

As the institutional literature convincingly shows, socioeconomic phenomena are to a large extent shaped by the formal institutions, that is, legal acts (laws and ordinances). However, the latter are formulated in a specific language that is difficult to understand, let alone to measure. However, since the early 1990s, a whole branch of economic analysis of governmental regulations has evolved. It is ...

Forward to the Past: Short-Term Effects of the Rent Freeze in Berlin

In 2020, Berlin enacted a rigorous rent-control policy: the “Mietendeckel” (rent freeze), aiming to stop rapidly growing rental prices. We evaluate this newly enacted but old-fashionably designed policy by analyzing its immediate supply-side effects. Using a rich pool of rent advertisements reporting asking rents and comprehensive dwelling characteristics, we perform hedonic-style Difference-in-Difference ...

Rent Price Control – Yet Another Great Equalizer of Economic Inequalities? Evidence from a Century of Historical Data

The long-run U-shaped patterns of economic inequality are standardly explained by basic economic trends (Piketty’s r>g), taxation policies, or “great levelers,” like catastrophes. This paper argues that housing policy, in particular rent control, is a neglected explanatory factor in understanding overall inequality. We hypothesize that rent control could decrease overall housing wealth, lower incomes ...