This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person?s actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

This paper compares the work attachment of French and German women after childbirth. Both fertility and employment of mothers are higher in France than in Germany. Since the sample of mothers deciding on employment after a child is born might not be representative for all women, we take account...

In recent decades, changes in parents' attitudes towards the importance of spending time with children to optimise their future behaviour and cognitive development have greatly affected patterns of time allocation among both working and non-working parents in all developed countries. We compare...

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...

Previous reviews of static labor supply estimations concentrate mainly on the evidence from the 1980s and 1990s, Anglo-Saxon countries and early generations of labor supply modeling. This paper provides a fresh characterization of steady-state labor supply elasticities for Western Europe and the...

Although demographic change leaves pay-as-you-go pension systems unsustainable, reforms, such as a higher pension age, are highly unpopular. This contribution looks into the role of intrinsic motivation as a driver for pension reform acceptance. Theoretical reasoning suggests that this driver...

I propose two new tests of Falk and Knell's (2004)prediction that individuals'reference income increases with ability. To overcome the difficulty that the reference income is not observed in existing large data sets, I extend Falk and Knell's model to establish a link between immigrants'...

We estimate the effects of the reform of the German Unemployment Insurance that replaced the wage related Unemployment Assistance with an income maintenance program and stronger means testing. We model the tax-benefit system and use the Socio-Economic Panel. We estimate a discrete labour supply...

Ziel dieses Beitrags ist die Quantifizierung der mit der Einführung des Arbeitslosengeldes II verbundenen Arbeitsangebots- und Beschäftigungseffekte. Zusätzlich wird ein Reformszenario simuliert, welches die Anreizstruktur im Niedriglohnbereich verbessern soll. Methodisch wird ein...

This paper asks whether the gap in subjective happiness between spouses matters per se, i.e. whether it predicts divorce. We use three panel databases to explore this question. Controlling for the level of life satisfaction of spouses, we find that a higher satisfaction gap, even in the first...