Das deutsche Einkommenssteuerrecht ist zu komplex und zu intransparent. Zahlreiche Reformkonzepte wurden in den vergangenen Jahren öffentlich diskutiert. Allerdings ist es bisher nicht gelungen, den bestehenden Zielkonflikt zu überwinden und positive Beschäftigungs- und Verteilungswirkungen...

We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method allowing us to disentangle the policy effect from changing market incomes. Over the period 1979-2007, the cumulative policy effect aggravated inequality by increasing the income share of the top...

We assess the effects of U.S. tax policy reforms on inequality by applying a new decomposition method that allows us to disentangle the direct policy effect from the effect of changing market incomes. Over the whole period 1979-2007 the cumulative tax policy effect aggravated income inequality...

Throughout the world, population aging is a major challenge that will continue well into the 21st century. While the patterns of the demographic transition are similar in most countries, timing differs substantially, in particular between industrialized and less developed countries. To the...

The paper examines the long-term implications of various reform options on retirement entry decisions and the actual retirement age of older workers. It focuses on the changes in pension legislation since 1992 and the reform options discussed by the German Social Security Reform Commission...

About 20% of German workers retire on disability pensions. Disability pensions provide fairly generous benefits for those who are not already age-eligible for an old-age pension and who are deemed unable to work for health reasons. In this paper, we use two sets of individual survey data to...

Population aging will be a major determinant of long-run economic development in industrial and developing countries. The extent of the demographic changes is dramatic in some countries and will deeply affect future labor, financial, and goods markets. The expected strain on public budgets and...

This paper discusses the consequences of population aging and a fundamental pension reform - that is, a shift towards more pre-funding – for capital markets in Germany. We use a stylized overlapping generations model to predict rates of return over a long horizon, taking demographic...

This paper provides a critical review of the pension reform strategy which turns defined benefits (DB) public pay-as-you-go systems into notional defined contribution (NDC) systems. We show that properly designed NDC public pension systems contain powerful economic and political mechanisms that...