In 2010 Germany spent 287 million Euro on health care or 11.6 % of GDP. Thus, health care is an important sector of the economy. The growth in health care expenditure was only a little bit higher than the overall growth between 2000 and 2010, with the exception of the last two years. In 2009 GDP decreased and in 2010 the increase was lower than in health care. As a result the share of total health ...
This paper provides health capital estimates for four European countries: Germany, Hungary, Spain and the United Kingdom. We show the sensitivity of the estimates to the use of different assumptions. We compare the resulting measures with information on healthcare expenditure to provide a broad indication of value for money of the different health systems. These indicators are necessarily crude, but ...
We assess the relevance of formal education for the productivity of the self-employed and distinguish between opportunity entrepreneurs, who voluntarily pursue a business opportunity, and necessity entrepreneurs, who lack alternative employment options. We expect differences in the returns to education between these groups because of different levels of control. We use the German Socio-economic Panel ...
Tax competition for the mobile factor capital has led to a trend in many countries to levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. In this study, we analyze the effect of such differential taxation on the debt ratio of firms. We exploit a 2009 tax reform in Germany as a quasi-experiment, which introduced a flat final withholding ...
We calculate the expected distributional effects of the European Emissions Trading System combining industry and household-level data. By combining data on direct CO2 emissions by production sector from the German Environmental Account with the German Input-Output Accounts, we calculate the CO2 intensity of each sector covered by the EU ETS. We focus on the impact of price increases in the electricity ...
Why do people engage in entrepreneurship and commit large parts of their personal wealth to their business, despite comparably low returns and high risk? This paper connects several streams of literature to shed some light on this puzzle and suggests possible future research avenues. Key insights from the literature are that entrepreneurs may operate in imperfect financial markets and that entrepreneurs ...
The life-cycle hypothesis implies that consumption would not decline at retirement. However, several studies found relevant declines in food consumption after retirement for the United States. Others concluded that this contradiction of the life-cycle hypothesis is solved by allowing for broader measures of consumption than food. Using repeated crosssection data for Germany, this paper analyzes the ...
