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The effect of unemployment insurance on exit from employment

Abstract: We investigate whether changes in the generosity of unemployment insurance (UI) affect exit from employment via UI. We exploit a recent reform of German UI that drastically reduced maximum benefit periods for workers aged 45 or older. Economic theory suggests that less generous UI makes employed workers more eager to keep their job, implying a reduction in unemployment entry after the...

The Business of Pirate Protection

Somali piracy is often described as a form of organized crime, with pirates providing their own security. Such an approach fails to distinguish between different actors within modern piracy and leads to policies focusing on deterring pirate recruits. Drawing on Protection Theory developed for the study of Mafias, a detailed analysis of Bloomberg maps of hijacked vessels' routes, field interviews and ...

Human Trafficking, a Shadow of Migration: Evidence from Germany

This paper empirically analyzes the causal relationship between migration and human trafficking inflows into Germany during the period between 2001 and 2010. My results suggest that migrant networks, measured by migrant stocks from a specific source country, increase the illicit, exploitative form of migration - human trafficking - from that respective country. However, the network effect varies across ...

Terrorism and Political Self-Placement in European Union Countries

Terrorism is widely regarded as a public bad vis-à-vis security - a public good - affecting the subjective well-being of citizens. As studies have shown, citizens' risk-perceptions and risk-assessment are affected by large scale terrorist acts. Reported evidence shows that individuals are often willing to trade-off civil liberties for enhanced security particularly as a post-terrorist attack reaction ...

Barrgh-gaining with Somali Pirates

Ransoms paid to Somali pirates are drifting upward and negotiation times are increasing, yet there is huge variation in bargaining outcomes across shipowners. We use a unique dataset of 179 Somali hijackings, and an underlying theoretical model of the bargaining process based on detailed interviews with ransom negotiators, to analyze the empirical determinants of ransom amounts and negotiation lengths. ...

Rising EEG Surcharge: Undesirable Distribution Effects Can Be Reduced

2013 will see a significant increase in the surcharge stipulated by the Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) and paid by power consumers to promote the use of renewable energies. This will equate to a rise in the share of private households’ consumer spending on electricity from around 2.3 percent on average in 2011 or almost 2.4 percent in 2012 to almost 2.5 percent in 2013. The EEG surcharge ...

Interventions and Institutions: Experimental Evidence on Scaling up Education Reforms in Kenya

Effective Taxation of Top Incomes in Germany

We exploit an exhaustive administrative dataset that includes the individual tax returns of all households in the top percentile of the income distribution in Germany to pin down the effective income taxation of households with very high incomes. Taking tax base erosion into account, we find that the top percentile of the income distribution pays an effective average tax rate of 30.5 percent and contributes ...

Personality Characteristics and the Decision to Become and Stay Self-Employed

This paper systematically investigates whether different kinds of personality characteristics influence entrepreneurial development. On the basis of a large, representative household panel survey, we examine the extent to which the Big Five traits and further personality characteristics, which are more specifically related to entrepreneurial tasks, influence entry into self-employment and survival ...

A Wealth Tax on the Rich to Bring down Public Debt? Revenue and Distributional Effects of a Capital Levy

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political agenda. We use survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and estimate the net wealth distribution ...