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DIW Discussion Papers 504 / 2005
Following Keen and Marchand (1997), the paper analyses the effect of fiscal competition on the composition of public spending in a model where capital and skilled workers are mobile while low skilled workers are immobile. Taxes are levied on capital and labour. Each group of workers benefits from a different kind of public good. Mobility of skilled workers provides an incentive for jurisdictions to ...
2005| Rainald Borck
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DIW Discussion Papers 503 / 2005
This paper surveys models of voting on redistribution. Under reasonable assumptions, the baseline model produces an equilibrium with the extent of redistributive taxation chosen by the median income earner; if the median is poorer than average, redistribution is from rich to poor. Increasing inequality increases redistribution. However, under different assumptions about the economic environment, redistribution ...
2005| Rainald Borck
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DIW Discussion Papers 485 / 2005
Propensity Score Matching (PSM) has become a popular approach to estimate causal treatment effects. It is widely applied when evaluating labour market policies, but empirical examples can be found in very diverse fields of study. Once the researcher has decided to use PSM, he is confronted with a lot of questions regarding its implementation. To begin with, a first decision has to be made concerning ...
2005| Marco Caliendo, Sabine Kopeinig
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DIW Discussion Papers 472 / 2005
In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in postwar German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. An important aim of this tax reform was to improve work incentives and, thereby, foster employment. Drawing on data of the German Socio Economic Panel (SOEP), we analyze the work incentive and employment effects of this reform on the basis of a behavioral ...
2005| Peter Haan, Viktor Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 470 / 2005
The extension of subsidized child care is currently on the top of the political agenda in Germany. In this paper the excess demand for subsidized child care slots is estimated using a partial observability model in the style of Abowd and Farber (1982). The results show that more than 50 percent of children aged 0-3 are queuing for child care slots, whereas only 10 percent of children aged 4-6 years ...
2005| Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 445 / 2004
We study the political economy of commuting subsidies in a model of a mono-centric city with two income classes. Depending on housing demand and transport costs, either the rich or the poor live in the central city and the other group in the suburbs. Commuting subsidies increase the net income of those with long commutes or high transport costs. They also affect land rents and therefore the income ...
2004| Rainald Borck, Matthias Wrede
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DIW Discussion Papers 444 / 2004
We evaluate the effect of the federal students' financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates into higher education by exploiting the exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in the repayment regulations. Supported students had to repay the full loan until 1990. Thereafter, 50 percent of the student aid has been offered as a non-repayable grant. Our results from simple difference-in-difference ...
2004| Hans J. Baumgartner, Viktor Steiner
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DIW Discussion Papers 438 / 2004
We analyze the work incentives and labor supply effects of the so-called mini-jobs reform (subsidies of social security contributions to people with low-earnings jobs) introduced in Germany in April 2003. The analysis is based on a structural labor supply model embedded in a detailed tax-benefit microsimulation model for which we use the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). Our simulation results show ...
2004| Viktor Steiner, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 421 / 2004
We analyze potential labor supply effects of a shift from the current German system of taxation of married couples to a system of limited real income splitting on the basis of econometric household labor supply model embedded in a tax-benefit model. Our simulation results show relatively small labor supply effects of a shift from the current system to one limited real income splitting system. In the ...
2004| Viktor Steiner, Katharina Wrohlich
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DIW Discussion Papers 419 / 2004
In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in postwar German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. Drawing on data of the GSOEP, we analyze the distributional and fiscal effects of the tax reform. Our analysis employs microsimulation techniques. Furthermore, we estimate behavioral effects of the tax reform using a discrete choice labor supply model. ...
2004| Peter Haan, Viktor Steiner