Publikationen der Abteilung Staat

Equilibrium Effects of Payroll Tax Reductions and Optimal Policy Design

We quantify the unintended effects of a low-wage payroll tax reduction using an equilibrium search model featuring bargaining, worker and firm productivity heterogeneity, labor taxes, and a minimum wage. The decentralized economy is inefficient due to search externalities and labor market policies. We estimate the model using French data and find that a significant reduction in low-wage payroll taxes ...

Competition and Moral Behavior: A Meta-Analysis of Forty-Five Crowd-Sourced Experimental Designs

Does competition affect moral behavior? This fundamental question has been debated among leading scholars for centuries, and more recently, it has been tested in experimental studies yielding a body of rather inconclusive empirical evidence. A potential source of ambivalent empirical results on the same hypothesis is design heterogeneity—variation in true effect sizes across various reasonable experimental ...

Why Investing in New Nuclear Plants Is Bad for the Climate: Commentary

Sin Taxes and Self-Control

According to theory, "sin taxes" are welfare improving if consumers with low self-control respond at least as much to the tax as consumers with high self-control. We investigate empirically if demand response to soft drink and fat tax variations in Denmark depends on consumers' self-control. We use a unique home-scan panel that includes a survey measure of self-control. When taxes increase, consumers ...

Can a Federal Minimum Wage Alleviate Poverty and Income Inequality? Ex-post and Simulation Evidence from Germany

Minimum wages are increasingly discussed as an instrument against (in-work) poverty and income inequality in Europe. Just recently the German government opted for a substantial ad-hoc increase of the minimum-wage level to euro12 per hour mentioning poverty prevention as an explicit goal. We use the introduction of the federal minimum wage in Germany in 2015 to study its redistributive impact on disposable ...

The Macroeconomic Impact of Increasing Investments in Malaria Control in 26 High Malaria Burden Countries: An Application of the Updated EPIC Model

Background Malaria remains a major public health problem. While globally malaria mortality affects predominantly young children, clinical malaria affects all age groups throughout life. Malaria not only threatens health but also child education and adult productivity while burdening government budgets and economic development. Increased investments in malaria control can contribute to reduce this burden ...

Working Life and Human Capital Investment: Causal Evidence from a Pension Reform

Should Mama or Papa Work? Variations in Attitudes towards Parental Employment by Country of Origin and Child Age

Employment among mothers has been rising in recent decades, although mothers of young children often work fewer hours than other women do. Parallel to this trend, approval of maternal employment has increased, albeit not evenly across groups. However, differences in attitudes remain unexplored despite their importance for better understanding mothers’ labour market behaviour. Meanwhile, the employment ...

Changes in Risk Attitudes Vary across Domains throughout the Life Course

Risk attitudes are important predictors of various economic decisions and socioeconomic outcomes. Although studies show that peoples’ general willingness to take risks decreases with age, there are few reports on the age dependence of domain-specific risk attitudes. Drawing on the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this study employs a proxy variable approach to disentangle age from periodic and cohort effects, ...

Causal Misperceptions of the Part-time Pay Gap

In this paper, we analyze if an increase in the working life leads to more human capital investment via on-the-job training. We obtain RDD-estimates from a sharp date-of-birth cut-off, generated by a pension reform that increased the Early Retirement Age (ERA) by three years for many women in Germany. In our preferred specification, we find that this reform causally increased on-the-job training by ...