After an economically tough start into the new millennium, Germany experienced an unprecedented employment boom after 2005 only stopped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Persistently high levels of inequality despite a booming labour market and drastically falling unemployment rates constituted a puzzle, suggesting either that the German job miracle mainly benefitted individuals in the mid- or high-income range ...
Across the world, tax exemptions for jobs with low earnings intend to incite non-participating workers to rejoin the labor market. However, such tax exemptions may also have negative equilibrium effects. The German minijob tax exemption offers a convenient case to identify equilibrium effects as it applies to some but not to other low-wage jobs. We build and estimate a structural job search model with ...
For the design of the pension system, it is crucial to disentangle the employment responses related to the substitution effect and the income effect. In this paper, we provide causal evidence regarding the importance of the income effect, which is generally assumed to be small or non-existent. We exploit a pension reform in Germany that raised pension bene- fits related to children. For the identification, ...
We study the employment effects of a large increase in the early retirement age (ERA) of women. Raising the ERA has the potential to extend contribution periods and to reduce the number of pensioners at the same time. However, workers may not be able to work longer or may choose other social support programs as exit routes from employment. Results suggest that the reform increases employment, unemployment ...
The aim of the project SOEP-RV is to link data from participants in the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) survey to their individual Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German Pension Insurance) records. For all SOEP respondents who give explicit consent to record linkage, SOEP-RV creates a linked dataset that combines the comprehensive multi-topic SOEP data with detailed cross-sectional and longitudinal ...
Die Beteiligung des Bundes an den Kosten der Unterbringung und Heizung (KdU) erfolgt seit der Einführung des SGB II 2005 mit dem Ziel, die Kommunen finanziell zu entlasten. Seitdem wurde die Bundesbeteiligung in Höhe, Struktur, Berechnung und Zweck beständig verändert. Der Beitrag zeigt, wie sich dieser Transfer im Zeitablauf entwickelt hat, aus welchen Komponenten er heute besteht und welche Kritikpunkte ...