Germany has the lowest birth rate among all OECD countries. To encourage fertility, the federal government has recently introduced a set of reforms that led to a substantial expansion of public child care for under three year old children. Using administrative county-level data, we exploit...

The birth of children often shifts the power balance within a family. If family decisions are made according to the spouses' welfare function, this shift in power may lead to a time consistency problem. The allocation of resources after the birth of children may differ from the ex-ante optimal...

This paper presents results from a randomized evaluation of a home visiting program for disadvantaged first time mothers and their families implemented in three German federal states. At the end of the first year of the program, children in home visited families perform significantly better than...

Young adults are the most hit by the current economic crisis. This can be observed in high youth unemployment rates in countries like Spain. At the same time fertility is relatively low in the most concerned countries whereas those in their fertile phase experience high unemployment rates. Based...

We study voting over higher education finance in an economy with two regions and two separated labor markets. Households dffer in their financial endowment and their children's ability. Non-students are immobile. Students decide where to study; they return home after graduation with exogenous...

This paper studies the impact of the state-dependent risk of a government default on the correlation of the scal balance and current account. We use a small open economy model where nonlinear risk premia arise endogenously when the government operates close to its scal limit, i.e. the maximum...

Complementary to microsimulation studies focusing on the impact of labor supply as a choice of hours worked we shed light on another variable that survey data are not capable of taking into account: the choice of work e ffort. Our aim is to investigate the eff ect of individual and joint...

One central lesson of the sovereign debt crisis is that the Eurozone (and the EU) needs institutional reform. Many observers argue that the monetary union should be complemented by a fiscal union . In this paper we provide the first quantitative analysis of important economic effects of an EU...

The present paper aims to quantify efficiency properties of real world social security systems of various institutional designs in order to identify an optimal pension design. Starting from a benchmark economy without social security, we introduce alternative pension systems and compare the...

This paper empirically investigates distributional and welfare effects of Germany's year 2000 tax reform. The reform is simulated in an ex-ante behavioral microsimulation approach. Dead weight loss of capital income taxation is estimated in a structural model for household savings and asset...