Publikationen der Abteilung Staat

The Private Equity Premium Puzzle Revisited: New Evidence on the Role of Heterogeneous Risk Attitudes

The empirical finding that entrepreneurs invest a large share of their wealth in their own firms, despite comparably low returns and high risk, has become known as the private equity premium puzzle. This paper provides evidence supporting the hypothesis that lower risk-aversion of entrepreneurs, and thus not necessarily credit constraints, may explain this puzzle. The analysis is based on a representative ...

The Political Economy of the German Länder Deficits: Weak Governments Meet Strong Finance Ministers

We analyse the deficits of the German Länder (regional states) for the period 1960 to 2005 and test a number of hypotheses derived from the literature on the political economy of public deficits. We find evidence for the weak government hypothesis, that is, coalition governments issue significantly more debt than single party governments - a result that is typically explained by the common pool problem. ...

Expected Future Earnings, Taxation, and University Enrollment: A Microeconometric Model with Uncertainty

Taxation changes the expectations of prospective university students about their future level and uncertainty of after-tax income. To estimate the impact of taxes on university enrollment, we estimate a structural microeconometric model, in which a high-school graduate decides to enter university studies if expected lifetime utility from this choice is greater than that anticipated from starting to ...

Distributional Effects of the Child Tax Credit in Poland and Its Potential Reforms

Can Child Care Policy Encourage Employment and Fertility? Evidence from a Structural Model

We develop a structural model of female employment and fertility which accounts for intertemporal feedback effects between these two outcomes. To identify the effect of financial incentives on employment and fertility we exploit variation in the tax and transfer system, which differs by employment state and number of children. Specifically, we simulate in detail the effects of the tax and transfer ...

Preferences for Childcare Policies: Theory and Evidence

We analyse preferences for public, private or mixed provision of childcare theoretically and empirically. We model childcare as a publicly provided private good. Richer households should prefer private provision to either pure public or mixed provision. If public provision redistributes from rich to poor, the rich should favour mixed over pure public provision, but if public provision redistributes ...

Dynamics in Transitory and Permanent Variation of Wages in Germany

We employ covariance structure models to decompose the cross-sectional variance of male wages in Germany into its permanent and transitory parts. We find that the steep growth of cross-sectional inequality during the early 2000s is predominantly driven by transitory factors.

Changes in Compulsory Schooling and the Causal Effect of Education on Health: Evidence from Germany

In this paper we investigate the causal effect of years of schooling on health and health-related behavior in West Germany. We apply an instrumental variables approach using as natural experiments several changes in compulsory schooling laws between 1949 and 1969. These law changes generate exogenous variation in years of schooling both across states and over time. We find evidence for a strong and ...

The Effect of Student Aid on the Duration of Study

In this paper I evaluate the effect of student aid on the success of academic studies. I focus on two dimensions, the duration of study and the probability of actually graduating with a degree. To determine the impact of financial student aid, I estimate a discrete-time duration model allowing for competing risks to account for different exit states (graduation and dropout) using individual level panel ...

Evaluating the German Mini-Job Reform Using a Natural Experiment

Increasing work incentives for people with low income is a common topic in the policy debate across European countries. The 'Mini-Job' reform in Germany had a similar motivation. We carry out an ex-post evaluation to identify the short-run effects of this reform. Our identification strategy uses an exogenous variation in the interview months in the Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP), which allows us ...