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Short- and Long-Term Participation Tax Rates and Their Impact on Labor Supply

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to hamper employment. This paper investigates the importance of incentives inherent in the tax-benefit system for the individual decision to take up work. Using German microdata over the period 1993–2010, we find that recent reforms in Germany increased work incentives at the extensive margin measured by ...

The Link between R&D, Innovation and Productivity: Are Micro Firms Different?

Genetic Variants Associated with Subjective Well-Being, Depressive Symptoms, and Neuroticism Identified through Genome-Wide Analyses

Very few genetic variants have been associated with depression and neuroticism, likely because of limitations on sample size in previous studies. Subjective well-being, a phenotype that is genetically correlated with both of these traits, has not yet been studied with genome-wide data. We conducted genome-wide association studies of three phenotypes: subjective well-being (n = 298,420), depressive ...

Career Prospects and Effort Incentives: Evidence from Professional Soccer

it is difficult to test the prediction that future career prospects create implicit effort incentives because researchers cannot randomly “assign” career prospects to economic agents. To overcome this challenge, we use data from professional soccer, where employees of the same club face different external career opportunities depending on their nationality. We test whether the career prospect of being ...

Expansion of Full-Day Childcare and Subjective Well-Being of Mothers: Interdependencies with Culture and Resources

This study investigates whether an expansion of state-subsidized full-day childcare may improve the subjective well-being of mothers of children under school age by acting as a boundary-spanning resource to facilitate the combination of employment and childcare responsibilities. It extends previous studies that showed contradictory results by demonstrating that the relationship with parental subjective ...

Voters Prefer More Qualified Mayors, but Does It Matter for Public Finances? Evidence for Germany

This paper studies the importance of politicians’ qualification, in terms of education and experience, for fiscal outcomes. The analysis is based on a large panel for 2031 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 close ...

Why Are Chinese MNEs not Financially Competitive in Cross-Border Acquisitions? The Role of State-Ownership

While MNEs from emerging markets — and China in particular — tend to pay high acquisition premiums when they engage in cross-border acquisition activity, the determinants of this overbidding are not completely understood. We argue that state ownership is a key factor in explaining the high acquisition premiums paid by emerging-market multinationals. Employing data on 450 Chinese outward cross-border ...

Personality-Situation Transactions from Adolescence to Old Age

People presumably choose and create their daily environments according to their personality. Prior research shows that, for example, more extraverted people engage more often in social situations, and more conscientious people engage more often in work-related activities compared with less extraverted or less conscientious people, respectively. The current study examined such personality-situation ...

Unemployment and Business Cycles

We develop and estimate a general equilibrium search and matching model that accounts for key business cycle properties of macroeconomic aggregates, including labor market variables. In sharp contrast to leading New Keynesian models, we do not impose wage inertia. Instead we derive wage inertia from our specification of how firms and workers negotiate wages. Our model outperforms a variant of the standard ...

Developing Better Measures of Neighbourhood Characteristics and Change for Use in Studies of Residential Mobility: A Case Study of Britain in the Early 2000s

This paper addresses the problem of measuring neighbourhood characteristics and change when working with individual level datasets to understand the effects of residential mobility. Currently available measures in Britain are in various respects unsuitable for this purpose. The paper explores a new indicator of small area poverty: the Unadjusted Means-tested Benefits Rate (UMBR), which divides claimants ...