Topic Distribution

Us State Cigarette Tax Increases and Smoke‐Free Legislation in Relation to Cigarette Expenditure across Household Socio‐Economic Circumstances: A Quasi‐Experimental Study

Background and Aims: While research has focused on outcomes of tobacco control policies, less is known about the mechanisms by which policies may affect tobacco use. We estimated the associations of changes in cigarette taxes and smoke‐free legislation with (1) any household cigarette expenditure and (2) the level of household expenditure on cigarettes, as well as (3) tested interactions ...

Social Image Concerns and Welfare Take-Up

Using a laboratory experiment, we present first evidence that social image concerns causally reduce the take-up of an individually beneficial transfer. Our design manipulates the informativeness of the take-up decision by varying whether transfer eligibility is based on ability or luck, and how the transfer is financed. We find that subjects avoid the inference both of being low-skilled (ability stigma) ...

How rising income inequality influenced economic growth in Germany

The cumulative growth rate of the German economy since reunification would have been around two percentage points higher if income inequality had remained constant. This is what simulations using the DIW Macroeconomic Model have shown. They were made under the assumption that the income distribution dynamics would not be influenced by any feedback effects of economic growth. In 2015, Germany’s ...

Politische Teilhabe ungleich: Armuts- und Reichtumsbericht

Where Is the Consumer Center of St. Petersburg?

In an urban economy, the distribution of people and real estate prices depends on the location of the central business district of a city. As distance from the city center increases, both prices and population density diminish, for travel costs increase in terms of time and money. As manufacturing gradually leaves the cities, the importance of consumer amenities as attractors of population to the urban ...

The Hukou Impact on the Chinese Wage Structure

Faster urbanization plays a key role in the Chinese economic transformation. However, at the Lewis turning point, the hukou institution constitutes a serious risk to the process, as it restricts the access of migrants to public services offered by cities. To attract further migration, firms started to accept a premium on top of the wage. Thus, the social discrimination introduced by the hukou system ...

Austerity, Inequality, and Private Debt Overhang

Using panel data of 17 OECD countries for 1980-2011, we find that the distributional consequences of fiscal consolidations depend significantly on the level of private indebtedness. Austerity leads to a strong and persistent increase in income inequality during periods of private debt overhang. In contrast, there are no discernible distributional effects when private debt is low. This result is robust ...

How Rising Income Inequality Influenced Economic Growth in Germany

The cumulative growth rate of the German economy since reunification would have been around two percentage points higher if income inequality had remained constant. This is whatsimulations using the DIW Macroeconomic Model have shown. They were made under the assumption that the income distribution dynamics would not be influenced by any feedback effects of economic growth. In 2015, Germany’s real ...

Towards an East German Wage Curve - NUTS Boundaries, Labour Market Regions and Unemployment Spillovers

The relevance of spatial effects in the wage curve can be rationalized by the model of monopsonistic competition in regional labour markets. However, distortions in extracting the regional unemployment effects arise in standard regional (i.e. NUTS) classifications as they fail to adequately capture spatial processes. In addition, the nonstationarity of wages and unemployment is often ignored. Both ...

Income Groups and Types of Employment in Germany since 1995

This report examines how income groups and forms of employment in Germany have changed in the past two decades. Since the mid-1990s, inequality in disposable household income in Germany has generally increased. This trend was in effect until 2005. While fewer people had disposable incomes in the median range, the proportion of the population at both tails of the income distribution increased. At the ...