Publikationen der Abteilung Staat

Entrepreneurship versus Joblessness: Explaining the Rise in Self-Employment

A large share of the workforce throughout the developing world is self-employed, and this proportion has increased in recent decades. Assessments of this development vary, with pull factors such as high returns to capital contrasted with push factors such as barriers to more desirable salaried jobs. Using a long panel dataset from Ghana, we empirically investigate the changing structure of earnings ...

Only Conservatives Are Voting in the Rain: Evidence from German Local and State Elections

In this note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the Conservatives profit from lower voter turnout at the expense of the Social Democrats. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using election day rain as an instrumental variable. Our particular contribution is the comparison of municipal and state electio ...

Long-term Care Insurance and Carers' Labor Supply: A Structural Model

In Germany, individuals in need of long-term care receive support through benefits of the long-term care insurance. A central goal of the insurance is to support informal care provided by family members. Care recipients can choose between benefits in kind (formal home care services) and benefits in cash. From a budgetary perspective, family care is often considered a cost-saving alternative to formal ...

Bayesian Procedures as a Numerical Tool for the Estimation of an Intertemporal Discrete Choice Model

Discrete choice models usually require a general specification of unobserved heterogeneity. In this paper, we apply Bayesian procedures as a numerical tool for the estimation of a female labor supply model based on a sample size that is typical for common household panels. We provide two important results for the practitioner: First, for a specification with a multivariate normal distribution for the ...

Empirical Welfare Analysis with Preference Heterogeneity

We apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of preference heterogeneity, derived from structural labour supply models. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the analysis. They also make the ethical priors, implicit in any interpersonal comparison, more explicit. ...

Signature Requirements and Citizen Initiatives: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Germany

Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of direct democratic instruments such as citizen initiatives. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiative petitions. Based on municipal-level data for Germany, we make use of changes in signature requirements that occur at specific population thresholds to build an identification ...

Lifetime Earnings Inequality in Germany

We employ German social security records to investigate intragenerational lifetime earnings inequality and mobility of yearly earnings for 35 cohorts, starting with the birth year 1935. Our main result is a striking secular rise of intragenerational inequality in lifetime earnings: West German men born in the early 1960s are likely to experience about 85% more lifetime inequality than their fathers. ...

The Mayor's Advantage: Causal Evidence on Incumbency Effects in German Mayoral Elections

Do Parties Matter? Estimating the Effect of Political Power in Multi-Party Systems

When there are more than two parties, policy outcomes are typically the result of a bargaining process. We investigate whether changes in political power for various parties have an effect on tax policies. We use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in our variable of interest: voting power. In order to isolate close elections in a proportional election ...

The Effects of Family Policy on Maternal Labor Supply: Combining Evidence from a Structural Model and a Quasi-experimental Approach

Parental leave and subsidized child care are prominent examples of family policies supporting the reconciliation of family life and labor market careers for mothers. In this paper, we combine different empirical strategies to evaluate the employment effects of these policies for mothers with young children. In particular we estimate a structural labor supply model and exploit quasi-experimental variation ...