-
DIW Discussion Papers 1340 / 2013
It is a longstanding debate whether members of parliament (MPs) should be allowed to follow sideline jobs in addition to their mandate. Critics claim that politicians already face binding time constraints and that moonlighting might lead to a neglect of inner-parliamentary duties. The purpose of this study is therefore to investigate whether politicians with more sideline jobs show less effort inside ...
2013| Felix Arnold
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1334 / 2013
The self-employed constitute a large proportion of the workforce in developing countries and the sector is growing. Different accounts exist as to the causes of this development, with pull factors such as high returns to capital contrasted with push factors such as barriers to more desirable salaried jobs. Using data from Ghana, we investigate the changing structure of earnings in self-employment relative ...
2013| Paolo Falco, Luke Haywood
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1320 / 2013
This paper proposes a dynamic life cycle model of health risks, employment, early retirement, and wealth accumulation in order to analyze the health-related risks of consumption and old age poverty. In particular, the model includes a health process, the interaction between health and employment risks, and an explicit modeling of the German public insurance schemes. I rely on a dynamic programming ...
2013| Daniel Kemptner
-
DIW Discussion Papers 1319 / 2013
Using a sample of Europeans aged 50+ from twelve countries in the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) we analyse the role of poor material conditions as a determinant of changes in health over a four-year period. We find that poverty defined with respect to relative incomes has no effect on changes in health. However, broader measures of poor material conditions such as subjective ...
2013| Maja Adena, Michal Myck
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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