In many countries organized as federations, fiscal-equalization schemes have been implemented to mitigate vertical or horizontal imbalances. Such schemes usually imply that the member states of the federation can only partly internalize marginal tax revenue before redistribution. Aside from this internalized revenue, referred to as the marginal tax-back rate, the remainder is redistributed. We investigate ...
We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the population, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme is almost distributionally neutral when looking at standard inequality measures. This is due to two offsetting ...
We analyze empirically the optimal design of social insurance and assistance programs when families obtain insurance by making labor supply choices for both spouses. For this purpose, we specify a structural life-cycle model of the labor supply and savings decisions of singles and married couples. Partial insurance against wage and employment shocks is provided by social programs, savings and the labor ...
The authors update previous findings on the total East-West gap in overall life satisfaction and its trend by using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) for the years 1992 to 2013. Additionally, the East-West gap and its trend are separately analyzed for men and women as well as for four birth cohorts. The results indicate that reported life satisfaction is on average significantly lower ...
The independent Expert Commission was appointed by Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy Sigmar Gabriel in August 2014 to draw up recommendations for action to increase private and public investment in Germany. The 21 members of the Expert Commission represent broad sections of German industry, society and academia. The Commission has the task of examining German society and industry from ...
By using estimates from an Almost Ideal Demand System (AIDS), we investigate how the German energy tax on car fuels changes the private households’ CO2 emissions, living standards, and post-tax income distribution. Our results show that the tax implies a trade-off between the aim to reduce emissions and vertical equity, which refers to the idea that people with a greater ability to pay taxes should ...
The existence of some 2 billion unused EU Allowances (EUAs) at the end of Phase II of the EU's Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) has sparked considerable debate about structural shortcomings of the EU ETS. At the same time, there has been a surprising lack of interest in one possible explanation of this accumulation of EUAs: the theory of intertemporal permit trading, i.e. allowance banking. In this ...
We analyze empirically the optimal design of social insurance and assistance programs when families obtain insurance by making labor supply choices for both spouses. For this purpose, we specify a structural life-cycle model of the labor supply and savings decisions of singles and married couples. Partial insurance against wage and employment shocks isprovided by social programs, savings and the labor ...
Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, this paper analyses the effects of spending part of adolescents’ leisure time on playing music or doing sports, or both. We find that while playing music fosters educational outcomes compared to doing sports, particularly so for girls and children from more highly educated families, doing sports improves subjective health. For educational outcomes, doing ...
