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DIW Discussion Papers 1311 / 2013
Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of public referenda. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiatives. Based on municipality-level data for Germany, we make use of legislative changes at specific population thresholds to build an identification strategy using a regression discontinuity design. We find ...
2013| Felix Arnold, Ronny Freier
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DIW Discussion Papers 1307 / 2013
In many federations, fiscal equalization schemes soften fiscal imbalances across the member states. Such schemes usually imply that the member states internalize only a small fraction of the additional tax revenue from an expansion of the state-specific tax bases, while the remainder of the additional tax revenue is redistributed horizontally or vertically. We address the question as to which extent ...
2013| Timm Bönke, Beate Jochimsen, Carsten Schröder
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DIW Discussion Papers 1303 / 2013
This study presents comprehensive macroeconomic measures on the revenue from business taxation in Germany. A comparison of the tax base reported in tax statistics with the corporate income derived from national accounts gives hints to considerable tax base erosion. The high weight of reported tax losses underlines this result. The average implicit tax rate on corporate income was around 21 percent ...
2013| Stefan Bach
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DIW Discussion Papers 1293 / 2013
Preferences for transport activities are often considered only in terms of time and money. Whilst congestion in automobile traffic increases costs by raising trip durations, the same is less obvious in public transport (PT), especially rail-based. This has lead many economic analyses to conclude that there exists a free lunch by reducing the attractiveness of automobile transport at no (or little) ...
2013| Luke Haywood, Martin Koning
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DIW Discussion Papers 1266 / 2013
Theoretical work based on social identity theory and in-group favoritism predicts that increased population diversity (e.g., due to immigration) reduces support for redistributive public policies. In this article, we add to the empirical literature testing this prediction in three ways. First, rather than ethno-linguistic or racial heterogeneity, we analyze religious diversity, which in many countries ...
2013| Ronny Freier, Benny Geys, Joshua Holm
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DIW Discussion Papers 1262 / 2012
This paper studies the importance of politician's qualification, in terms of education and experience, for fiscal outcomes. The analysis is based on a large panel for 2,031 German municipalities for which we have collected information on municipal budgets as well as the election results and qualification levels of mayoral candidates. We principally use a Regression Discontinuity Design focusing on ...
2012| Ronny Freier, Sebastian Thomasius
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DIW Discussion Papers 1256 / 2012
This paper studies the effect of attending a high-quality secondary school on subsequent educational outcomes. The analysis is based on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study in which we observe children when they make their secondary school choice (between ages 10-12) and later when they self-report on their intentions with regard to their further educational path (between ages 16-17). To ...
2012| Ronny Freier, Johanna Storck
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DIW Discussion Papers 1241 / 2012
We assess the relevance of formal education for the productivity of the self-employed and distinguish between opportunity entrepreneurs, who voluntarily pursue a business opportunity, and necessity entrepreneurs, who lack alternative employment options. We expect differences in the returns to education between these groups because of different levels of control. We use the German Socio-economic Panel ...
2012| Frank M. Fossen, Tobias J. M. Büttner
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DIW Discussion Papers 1240 / 2012
Applying a financial assets approach, we analyze the returns and earnings risk of investments into different types of human capital. Even though the returns from investing in human capital are extensively studied, little is known about the properties of the returns to different types of human capital within a given educational path. Using information from the German Micro Census, we estimate the ...
2012| Daniela Glocker, Johanna Storck
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DIW Discussion Papers 1239 / 2012
The number of parties in government is usually considered to increase spending. We show that this is not necessarily the case. Using a new method to detect close election outcomes in multi-party systems, we isolate truly exogenous variation in the type of government. With data from municipalities in the German state of Bavaria, we show in regression discontinuity-type estimations that absolute majorities ...
2012| Ronny Freier, Christian Odendahl