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Why a Labour Market Boom Does Not Necessarily Bring Down Inequality: Putting Together Germany’s Inequality Puzzle

After an economically tough start into the new millennium, Germany experienced an unprecedented employment boom after 2005 only stopped by the COVID-19 pandemic. Persistently high levels of inequality despite a booming labour market and drastically falling unemployment rates constituted a puzzle, suggesting either that the German job miracle mainly benefitted individuals in the mid- or high-income range ...

State Aid for Environmental Protection and Energy – Focus on Electro-intensive Firms

The European Commission commissioned an international consortium including the DIW Berlin with a background study on State aid in the field of environmental protection and energy. The results of the study are meant to support the Commission in the revision of the EU Guidelines on State aid for environmental protection and energy (EEAG). One key focus of the study was to assess the current rules...

Political Corruption in the Execution of Public Contracts

This paper presents a novel theoretical framework to explain the occurrence of corruption in public procurement. It extends the agency cost-padding model by Laffont and Tirole (1992) to allow for the principal to be a partially selfish politician who can design the contract auditing policy. It is found that a benevolent politician, by choosing a sufficiently strict auditing, deters the contracting ...

Social Status Concerns and the Political Economy of Publicly Provided Private Goods

We analyse the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social status. Status concerns motivate richer individuals to vote for the public provision of goods they themselves buy in markets: a higher provision level attracts more individuals to the public sector, enhancing the social exclusivity of market purchases. Majority voting may lead to a public ...

Debt – Blessing or Curse? Editorial

Government Spending Multipliers in (Un)certain Times

We estimate the dynamic effects of government spending shocks, using time-varying volatility in US data modeled through a Markov switching process. We find that the average government spending multiplier is significantly and persistently above one, driven by a crowding-in of private consumption and non-residential investment. We rationalize the results empirically through a contemporaneously countercyclical ...

Population Decline Creating Constant Pressure on Eastern German States and Municipalities on the Expenditure Side

As the German constitution aims for equal living conditions, a huge number of political measures to enhance the conditions in the new states were undertaken after unification (known as the “Aufbau Ost”). In the new states, expenditure per capita rose significantly over the average expenditure of the old states and their municipalities and huge budget deficits occurred. Beginning in the mid-1990s, expenditure ...

Notes about Comparing Long-Term Care Expenditures across Countries: Comment on "Financing Long-Term Care: Lessons from Japan"

The comparison of long-term care (LTC) expenditures is a difficult task. National LTC systems differ widely in terms of eligibility criteria, level of benefits, institutional variety and regional heterogeneity. In this commentary I will first give some general remarks on cross country comparisons. Then I discuss the role of the informal sector which is the most important pillar of all LTC systems. ...

Interactions between Bank Levies and Corporate Taxes: How Is the Bank Leverage Affected?

Regulatory bank levies set incentives for banks to reduce leverage. At the same time, corporate income taxation makes funding through debt more attractive. In this paper, we explore how regulatory levies affect bank capital structure, depending on corporate income taxation. Based on bank balance sheet data from 2006 to 2014 for a panel of EU-banks, our analysis yields three main results: The introduction ...

Public investment as a driver of private investment

The project examines the transmission channels between public investment and private investment activity in Germany, estimating the aggregate relationship with econometric models, focusing on the specific effects of individual investment categories (e.g., R & D investment) and areas of responsibility (e.g., Defense, Education, Environment). In view of possible barriers to investment, another...