-
Referierte Aufsätze Web of Science
To counteract the financial pressure emerging in aging societies, statutory pension schemes are undergoing fundamental reforms in many Western countries. Starting with cohort 1937, Germany introduced permanent pension deductions for early retirement. This study examines the profitability of pension contributions against the background of this reform for cohorts 1935–1945. Internal rates of return (IRR) ...
In:
German Economic Review
17 (2016), 2, S. 206-233
| Holger Lüthen
-
Referierte Aufsätze Web of Science
Tax competition for capital has led to a trend where many countries levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. This study analyzes the effect on firm debt usage. We exploit Germany’s 2009 tax reform, which introduced a final withholding tax on interest income with a flat rate 18 percentage points below the unchanged tax rate on ...
In:
International Tax and Public Finance
23 (2016), 1, S. 48-81
| Frank M. Fossen, Martin Simmler
-
Referierte Aufsätze Web of Science
Theoretical work based on social identity theory predicts that population diversity undermines redistributive public policies. This article tests this proposition exploiting an exogenous shock in diversity due to Germany’s reunification. In contrast to previous work on ethno-linguistic or racial heterogeneity, we specifically analyze religious diversity, which is an increasingly relevant social cleavage ...
In:
Journal of Urban Economics
94 (2016), S. 1-12
| Ronny Freier, Benny Geys, Joshua Holm
-
Referierte Aufsätze Web of Science
A large share of the workforce throughout the developing world is self-employed, and this proportion has increased in recent decades. Assessments of this development vary, with pull factors such as high returns to capital contrasted with push factors such as barriers to more desirable salaried jobs. Using a long panel dataset from Ghana, we empirically investigate the changing structure of earnings ...
In:
Journal of Development Economics
118 (2016), S. 245-265
| Paolo Falco, Luke Haywood
-
Referierte Aufsätze Web of Science
Preferences over jobs depend on wages and non-wage aspects. Variation in wealth may change the importance of income as a motivation for working. Higher wealth levels may make good non-wage characteristics relatively more important. This hypothesis is tested empirically using a reduced form search model in which differential job leaving rates identify willingness to pay for non-wage aspects of jobs. ...
In:
Labour Economics
38 (2016), S. 1-11
| Luke Haywood
-
Referierte Aufsätze Web of Science
In this note, we use data from different elections in the German state of North-Rhine Westphalia between 1975 and 2010 to show that the Conservatives profit from lower voter turnout at the expense of the Social Democrats. We deal with the endogeneity of voter turnout by using election day rain as an instrumental variable. Our particular contribution is the comparison of municipal and state electio ...
In:
Electoral Studies
41 (2016), S. 213-224
| Felix Arnold, Ronny Freier
-
Referierte Aufsätze Web of Science
In Germany, individuals in need of long-term care receive support through benefits of the long-term care insurance. A central goal of the insurance is to support informal care provided by family members. Care recipients can choose between benefits in kind (formal home care services) and benefits in cash. From a budgetary perspective, family care is often considered a cost-saving alternative to formal ...
In:
Health Economics
24 (2015), 9, S. 1178-1191
| Johannes Geyer, Thorben Korfhage
-
Referierte Aufsätze Web of Science
Discrete choice models usually require a general specification of unobserved heterogeneity. In this paper, we apply Bayesian procedures as a numerical tool for the estimation of a female labor supply model based on a sample size that is typical for common household panels. We provide two important results for the practitioner: First, for a specification with a multivariate normal distribution for the ...
In:
Empirical Economics
49 (2015), 3, S. 1123-1141
| Peter Haan, Daniel Kemptner, Arne Uhlendorff
-
Referierte Aufsätze Web of Science
Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of direct democratic instruments such as citizen initiatives. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiative petitions. Based on municipal-level data for Germany, we make use of changes in signature requirements that occur at specific population thresholds to build an identification ...
In:
Public Choice
162 (2015), 1-2, S. 43-56
| Felix Arnold, Ronny Freier
-
Referierte Aufsätze Web of Science
We apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of preference heterogeneity, derived from structural labour supply models. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the analysis. They also make the ethical priors, implicit in any interpersonal comparison, more explicit. ...
In:
International Tax and Public Finance
22 (2015), Iss. 2, S. 224-251
| André Decoster, Peter Haan