Income inequality in Germany has been continuously increasing during the past 20 years. In general, this is understood as an increase in inequality of wages due to changes in bargaining power of employees. However, the role of changing household structure is widely neglected. Societal trends...

The distributional consequences of the recent economic crisis are still broadly unknown. While it is possible to speculate which groups are likely to be hardest-hit, detailed distributional studies are still largely backward-looking due to a lack of real-time microdata. This paper studies the...

Information provided by experts is widely believed to play a key role in shaping attitudes towards policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper uses a survey experiment to assess whether providing citizens with expert information about the health risk of COVID-19 and the economic costs...

The highly dynamic nature of the COVID-19 crisis poses an unprecedented challenge to policy makers around the world to take appropriate income-stabilizing countermeasures. To properly design such policy measures, it is important to quantify their effects in real-time. However, data on the...

Using quarterly data for German counties, we study how housing prices and offers respond to higher transaction costs induced by tax increases. Since 2006, states can set their own tax rates on real estate transfers. Several and substantial tax hikes generate variation across time and states...

Many governments have replaced traditional cash-based accounting with some form of accrual-based accounting system. However, empirical evidence on the effects of the public accounting system on fiscal policy is scarce. Following rules by the federal states, municipalities in Germany have adopted...

This paper explores the international transmission of U.S. tax shocks and provides evidence for the German economy. Using structural vector autoregressions, we find that after a U.S. tax cut, German GDP increases moderately. While higher U.S. demand stimulates German exports, a deterioration of...