Publikationen der Abteilung Staat

Car Ownership and Hedonic Adaptation

Using panel data from the UK, we study the long-term effect of purchase decisions of automobiles on individuals’ happiness. We find a significant and sizable decrease in individual happiness in the years after a car purchase. We develop a model of hedonic adaptation that can explain these results. Applying the model to the data indicates a strong degree of habit persistence of around 80%, and that ...

Pension Incentives and Early Retirement

In this paper we exploit a cohort-specific pension reform to estimate the labour market effects of changes in the financial incentives to retire. In particular, we analyse the effects of the introduction of cohort-specific deductions for early retirement on female retirement, employment and unemployment. For the empirical analysis we use high-quality administrative data from the German pension insurance. ...

Crowding in Public Transport: Who Cares and Why?

Crowding on public transport (PT) is a major issue for commuters around the world. Nevertheless, economists have rarely investigated the causes of crowding discomfort. Furthermore, most evidence on the costs of PT crowding is based on trade-offs between crowding, travel time and money. First, this paper assesses discomfort with PT crowding at various density levels across heterogeneous individuals ...

How Does Education Improve Cognitive Skills? Instructional Time versus Timing of Instruction

This paper investigates two mechanisms through which education may affect cognitive skills in adolescence, exploiting a school reform carried out at the state level in Germany as a quasi-natural experiment to identify causal effects: between 2001 and 2007, years at academic-track high school were reduced by one, leaving the overall curriculum unchanged. First, I exploit the variation over time and ...

Earnings Responses to Social Security Contributions

This paper utilises the discontinuities induced by earnings caps for social security contributions (SSC) in Germany to analyse the effect of SSC on gross labour earnings. Economic incidence is identified by exploiting an increase of a regional earnings cap of health and long-term care insurance as a natural experiment. Based on administrative data, difference-in-differences models are estimated. I ...

Dubious versus Trustworthy Faces: What Difference Does It Make for Tax Compliance?

We find experimental evidence that the decision problem of tax compliance changes if subjects’ declarations are not randomly assessed, but is based on their appearance as captured by pictures of their faces, even if the aggregate audit probability does not change. Some subjects may fear that their picture looks rather dubious, whereas others may believe that their picture looks more trustworthy than ...

Voters Prefer More Qualified Mayors, but Does It Matter for Public Finances? Evidence for Germany

This paper studies the importance of politicians’ qualification, in terms of education and experience, for fiscal outcomes. The analysis is based on a large panel for 2031 German municipalities for which we have collected information on municipal budgets as well as the election results and qualification levels of mayoral candidates. We principally use a regression discontinuity design focusing on close ...

Locus of Control and Mothers' Return to Employment

Voting for Direct Democratic Participation: Evidence from an Initiative Election

We study a constitutional change in the German State of Bavaria where citizens, not politicians, granted themselves more say in politics at the local level through a state initiative election in 1995. This institutional setting allows us to observe revealed preferences for direct democracy and to identify factors which explain these preferences. Empirical evidence suggests that support for direct democracy ...

Two Steps Forward - One Step Back? Evaluating Contradicting Child Care Policies in Germany

We apply a structural model of mothers’ labor supply and child care choices to evaluate the effects of two child care reforms in Germany that were introduced simultaneously. A legal claim to subsidized child care became effective for children aged 1 year or older. Moreover, a new child care allowance (‘Betreuungsgeld’) came into effect. It is granted to families who do not use publicly subsidized child ...