Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to reduce work incentives for lower income classes and to increase durations of unemployment. Standard studies measure work incentives based on annual income concepts. This paper analyzes how work...

In this paper, we test empirically for strategic behaviour among the states using the cash support program Aid to Families with Dependant Children (AFDC). To motivate the empirical work, we adept Wildasinś [41] model of income redistribution to a model of "interjurisdictional welfare...

Dustmann/ Fitzenberger/ Schönberg/ Spitz-Oener (2014) praise the flexibility of German labour market institutions for the German turn-around from "Sick Man of Europe to Economic Superstar": The more decentralized, firm-specific wage-setting process since the mid-1990s increased wage inequality...

We analyze the distributive justice of the combined burden of income taxes, social security taxes and public transfers on employee households in the United States on the federal level and in six member states. To investigate whether the treatment of families by the aggregate tax and transfer...

Governmental activities in welfare states influence private charitable giving predominantly in two ways: (1) government spending on the provision of public goods may cause crowding out of private charitable contributions; and (2) tax incentives may boost private charitable giving. For a rich...

We analyze the distributive justice of the combined burden of taxes, social security contributions and public transfers on employee households. In order to investigate whether the treatment of families by the aggregate tax-benefit system can be regarded as "fair" we compare the equivalent...

We study three budget-neutral reforms of the German tax and transfer system designed to improve work incentives for people with low incomes: a feasible flat tax reform that provides a basic income which is equal to the current level of the means tested unemployment benefit, and two alternative...