This paper investigates the causal impact of displacement on health outcomes for Colombian children of different age cohorts. It uses the Colombian Demographic and Health Survey 2010, which provides both a number of health outcomes and information about displacement of households. Two different...

We examine optimal taxation and social insurance if insurance markets are imperfect. This requires the development of a theory of labor supply under uncertainty. We show that the case for social insurance is not generally reinforced by adverse selection in insurance markets as social insurance...

I test if parties matter with respect to the allocation of public expenditures in Germany. Considering the allocation of rights and duties due to the federal structure, two econometric models are estimated. First, a SURE model analyses spending at the federal level for the period from 1950 to...

This paper examines the effects of political determinants on the allocation of public expenditures. Analyzing an OECD panel from 1990 to 2004, a SURE model controls for the contemporaneous correlation between the different expenditure categories (COFOG). I find that left governments set other...

This paper examines how policy affects social expenditures. Analyzing an OECD panel from 1980 to 2003, five political variables are tested: Election- and pre-election years, the ideological party composition of the governments, the number of coalition partners and the fact, if the ruling...

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....

Empirical evidence so far found ambiguous results for the direction of effect of marginal income tax rates on employee remuneration. Based on the GSOEP data from 2002 through 2008 this study analyzes the impact of the marginal tax load on the employee side on the wage rate also allowing average...

This paper documents the magnitude, pattern, and evolution of lifetime earnings inequality in Germany. Based on a large sample of earning biographies from social security records, we show that the intra-generational distribution of lifetime earnings of male workers has a Gini coefficient around...

In this paper we empirically derive the welfare effects of a shift from joint taxation with full income splitting to a revenue neutral system of individual taxation in Germany. For the empirical welfare evaluation we estimate the preference heterogeneity in the population and use normative...

The aim of this paper is to apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of random utility models of labour supply. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the...