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Ethnic Inequality in Preterm Birth

Preterm delivery is associated with lower health chances after birth. Women with a migration background often have a higher preterm risk (<37 gestational weeks) compared to the nonmigrant majority population. In Germany, little is known about the scope and causes for more adverse birth outcomes among immigrant women. Focusing primarily on two large migrant groups, that is first-generation Turkish ...

Discrimination in Hiring Based on Potential and Realized Fertility: Evidence from a Large-Scale Field Experiment

Due to conventional gender norms, women are more likely to be in charge of childcare than men. From an employer’s perspective, in their fertile age they are also at “risk” of pregnancy. Both factors potentially affect hiring practices of firms. We conduct a large-scale correspondence test in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, sending out approx. 9,000 job applications, varying job candidate’s personal ...

Supply of Schools, Educational Attainment and Earnings

Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History

Max Weber attributed the higher economic prosperity of Protestant regions to a Protestant work ethic. We provide an alternative theory: Protestant economies prospered because instruction in reading the Bible generated the human capital crucial to economic prosperity. We test the theory using county-level data from late 19th-century Prussia, exploiting the initial concentric dispersion of the Reformation ...

European Integration and Income Inequality

Self-Managed Working Time and Employee Effort: Microeconometric Evidence

Based on German individual-level panel data, this paper empirically examines the impact of self-managed working time (SMWT) on employee effort. Theoretically, workers may respond positively or negatively to having control over their own working hours, depending on whether SMWT increases work morale, induces reciprocal work intensification, or encourages employee shirking. We find that SMWT employees ...

Self-Managed Working Time and Employee Effort: Theory and Evidence

This paper theoretically and empirically examines the impact of self-managed working time (SMWT) on employee effort. As a policy of increased worker autonomy, SMWT can theoretically increase effort via intrinsic motivation and reciprocal behaviour, but it can also lead to a decrease of effort due to a loss of control. Based on German individual-level panel data, we find that SMWT employees exert higher ...

Reform of Income Splitting for Married Couples: Only Individual Taxation Significantly Increases Working Incentives

The joint taxation of married couples in Germany with full income splitting is still a major hindrance to the participation of married women in the labor market. In their current financial proposals, the SPD (Social Democratic Party) is calling for income splitting for married couples to be replaced by individual taxation with maintenance deductions, in accordance with existing schemes for divorced ...

Tax and Transfer System: Considerable Redistribution Mainly Via Social Insurance

Overall monetary redistribution via the tax and transfer system leads to net incomes being much more evenly distributed in Germany than market income. As a result, in 2011, the Gini coefficient decreased from 0.5 for market income to 0.29 for household disposable income. The social security system has a significant share in total income redistribution by the government, making up more than half of ...

Increasing the Value-Added Tax to Re-Finance a Reduction of Social Security Contributions? A behavioral microsimulation analysis for Germany