Who is most likely to change their risk preferences over the lifecourse? Using German nationally representative survey data and methods to separate age from cohort effects, we estimate the lifecycle patterns in the socioeconomic gradient of self-reported risk preferences. Tolerance to risk drops...

There is still considerable dispute about the magnitude of labor supply elasticities. While differences in micro and macro estimates are recently attributed to frictions and adjustment costs, we show that relatively low labor supply elasticities derived from microeconometric models can also be...

We suggest the first large-scale international comparison of labor supply elasticities for 17 European countries and the US, separately by gender and marital status. Measurement differences are netted out by using a harmonized empirical approach and comparable data sources. We find that own-wage...

In 2004, the German Social Health Insurance introduced a co-payment for the first doctor visit in a calendar quarter. I combine a structural model of health care demand and a difference-in-differences strategy to estimate the effect of that reform on the number of visits. In the model, the...

According to the "healthy immigrant effect" (HIE), immigrants upon arrival are healthier than locally born residents. However, this health advantage is supposed to diminish or even disappear over a relatively short period and the immigrants' health status is converging to that of the natives....

Demographic change causes an undersupply of financial old age benefits within the statutory pay-as-you-go pension system in Germany. Therefore, the provision of occupational as well as private pensions has to be enhanced. However, there seems to be an undersupply of occupational pension...

This paper contributes to the debate about the optimal design of tax-transfer systems. Based on the theory of optimal taxation, combined with microsimulation and microeconometric techniques we derive the welfare function which makes the current German tax and transfer system for single women...