Publikationen der Abteilung Staat

Empirical Welfare Analysis with Preference Heterogeneity

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. ...

Signature Requirements and Citizen Initiatives: Quasi-experimental Evidence from Germany

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 ...

Lifetime Earnings Inequality in Germany

We employ German social security records to investigate intragenerational lifetime earnings inequality and mobility of yearly earnings for 35 cohorts, starting with the birth year 1935. Our main result is a striking secular rise of intragenerational inequality in lifetime earnings: West German men born in the early 1960s are likely to experience about 85% more lifetime inequality than their fathers. ...

The Mayor's Advantage: Causal Evidence on Incumbency Effects in German Mayoral Elections

The Distribution of Crowding Costs in Public Transport: New Evidence from Paris

Whilst congestion in automobile traffic increases trip durations, this is often not the case in rail-based public transport where congestion rather leads to in-vehicle crowding, often neglected in empirical studies. Using original survey data from Paris, this article assesses the distribution of comfort costs of congestion in public transport. Estimating willingness to pay for less crowded trips at ...

Do Parties Matter? Estimating the Effect of Political Power in Multi-Party Systems

When there are more than two parties, policy outcomes are typically the result of a bargaining process. We investigate whether changes in political power for various parties have an effect on tax policies. We use an instrumental variable approach where close elections provide the exogenous variation in our variable of interest: voting power. In order to isolate close elections in a proportional election ...

The Effects of Family Policy on Maternal Labor Supply: Combining Evidence from a Structural Model and a Quasi-experimental Approach

Parental leave and subsidized child care are prominent examples of family policies supporting the reconciliation of family life and labor market careers for mothers. In this paper, we combine different empirical strategies to evaluate the employment effects of these policies for mothers with young children. In particular we estimate a structural labor supply model and exploit quasi-experimental variation ...

Race to the Debt Trap? Spatial Econometric Evidence on Debt in German Municipalities

Through an intertemporal budget constraint, jurisdictions may gain advantages in tax and spending competition by ‘competing’ on debt. While the existing spatial econometric literature focuses on tax and spending competition, very little is known about spatial interaction via public debt. If jurisdictions compete for mobile capital to finance public spending, they may compete in debt levels as well ...

The Earnings Return to Graduating with Honors: Evidence from Law Graduates

This paper aims at studying the causal effects of graduating from a university with an honors degree on subsequent earnings. While a rich body of literature has focused on estimating returns to human capital, few studies have analyzed returns at the very top of the education distribution. We highlight the importance of honors degrees for future labor market success in the context of German law graduates. ...

Differential Income Taxation and Household Asset Allocation

This article empirically investigates the effects of differential income taxation on households' portfolio choice and asset allocation, applying a two-stage budgeting model of asset demand to German survey data. The model is structured into the discrete and the continuous asset choice. Cross-sectional variation in marginal tax rates, appropriately instrumented, as well as over-time variation from a ...