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Competition and VAT Pass-Through

We examine how competition affects VAT pass-through in isolated oligopolistic markets as defined by the Greek islands. Using daily gasoline prices and a difference-in-differences methodology, we study how changes in VAT rates are passed through to consumers in islands with different number of retailers. We show that pass-through increases with competition, going from 50% in monopoly to around 80%...

Emergency-Aid for Self-employed in the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Flash in the Pan?

The self-employed faced strong income losses during the Covid-19 pandemic. Many governments introduced programs to financially support the self-employed during the pandemic, including Germany. The German Ministry for Economic Affairs announced a €50bn emergency-aid program in March 2020, offering one-off lump-sum payments of up to €15,000 to those facing substantial revenue declines. By reassuring ...

Socio-economic and Demographic Factors Influencing the Spatial Spread of COVID-19 in the USA

As the COVID-19 pandemic progressed in the USA, ‘hotspots’ shifted geographically over time to suburban and rural counties showing a high prevalence of the disease. We analyse population-adjusted confirmed case rates based on daily US county-level variations in COVID-19 confirmed case counts during the first several months of the pandemic (1 March 2020 through 23 May 2020) to evaluate the spatial dependence ...

Carbon Contracts for Difference as an Instrument for Strengthening Climate Cooperation between Industrialized and Emerging Economies

Industrialized countries and emerging economies must cooperate in order to decarbonize the emissions-intensive industrial sector and to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. While Germany and the other G7 countries have committed to supporting emerging economies in their efforts to combat climate change via international climate finance, it remains to be seen how this support can be implemented ...

Health Policy and Access to Health Care in Germany: A Fragmented System for Asylum Seekers’ Health

In Germany, health needs of citizens and ordinary residents are taken care of under the scope of statutory social and health insurance. The asylum-seeking population, however, receives healthcare through a parallel system, where decisions on provision of health services are not met at a central health governance level, but rather at federal state and sometimes at municipal...

Unconditional Basic Income: from theory to practice

This paper aims to investigate whether Van Parijs' theory of Unconditional Basic Income (UBI) can address the criticism of the lack of individual responsibility on the part of recipients. To do so, I relate this UBI theory to the results of field experiments that study the impact of UBI on employment. Theoretical and empirical results suggest that the UBI does not lead to a decrease in labor...

The Distributuional Impact of Real-Time Pricing

Trust We Lost: The Impact of the Treuhand Experience on Political Alienation in East Germany

Do politically administered mass layoffs undermine trust and political interest? During the German reunification, formerly state-owned socialist firms in East Germany were privatized by the Treuhand, which came at the cost of massive job losses and public protest. I demonstrate that these activities had a detrimental effect on attitudes and political behavior of the affected individuals. Using survey ...

Associations between Proximity to Gas Production Activity in Counties and Birth Outcomes across the US Course

Despite mounting evidence on the health effects of natural gas development (NGD), including hydraulic fracturing(“fracking”), existing research has been constrained to high-producing states, limiting generalizability. Toexpand the scope of previous research, we examined the associations between prenatal exposure and NGDproduction activity in 28 states on birth outcomes overall and by race/ethnicity. ...

SOEP Brown Bag Seminar

About. The seminar is organized by the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and: provides an opportunity to present on-going research using the SOEP or other survey data, is a valuable opportunity to get in contact with SOEP staff and to get feedback from an audience that is well versed in the generation and use of complex survey data, focuses on SOEP-related topics, such as (but not exclusively) "Social ...