A lack of transparency about policy performance can pose a major obstacle to welfare-enhancing policy competition across jurisdictions. In parallel surveys with German citizens and state parliamentarians, we document that both groups misperceive the performance of their state's education system....

We analyse in what way co-determination affects non-compliance with the German minimum wage, which was introduced in 2015. The Works Constitution Act (WCA), the law regulating co-determination at the plant level, provides works councils with indirect means to ensure compliance with the statutory...

This paper investigates whether incentives generated by public policies contribute to motherhood penalties. Specifically, we study the consequences of subsidized small jobs, the German Minijobs, which are frequently taken up by first-time mothers upon labor market return. Using a combination of...

Is time-varying firm-level uncertainty a major cause or amplifier of the business cycle? This paper investigates this question in the context of a heterogeneous-firm RBC model with persistent firm-level productivity shocks and lumpy capital adjustment, where cyclical changes in uncertainty...

This paper applies the Phillips and Sul (2007) method to test for convergence in stock returns to an extensive dataset including monthly stock price indices for five EU countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK) as well as the US over the period 1973-2008. We carry out the...

The German Federal government has allowed some regions (Approved Local Providers) to be solely responsible for the care of long-term unemployed. The remaining regions had to form Joint Local Agencies, where the local social benefit administrations work together with the local public employment...

This paper studies the role of beliefs about own performance or appearance for compliance at the customs. In an experiment in which underreporting has a higher expected payoff than truthful reporting we find: a large share, about 15-20 percent of the subjects, is more compliant if they have...

We review the labor market implications of recent real-business-cycle models that successfully replicate the empirical equity premium. We document the fact that all models considered in this survey with the exception of Boldrin, Christiano, and Fisher (2001) imply a negative correlation of...

The distributional consequences of the recent economic crisis are still broadly unknown. While it is possible to speculate which groups are likely to be hardest-hit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking due to a lack of real-time microdata. This paper studies the...

Feed-in tariffs under the Renewable Energy Sources Act, the so-called Erneuerbare-Energien-Gesetz (EEG), have triggered a massive expansion of electricity from renewable energy sources in Germany over the last decade. The increase in non-competitive renewable power generation though went hand in...