Several recent studies show that the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is not a sufficient statistic for the welfare costs of taxation due to factors such as taxbase shifting. This paper provides an additional argument demonstrating the non-sufficiency of the ETI, namely tax deductions....

In this paper, we investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on German household income using a micro-level approach. We combine a microsimulation model with labour market transition techniques to simulate the COVID-19 shock on the German labour market. We find the consequences of the...

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...

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...

How can retirement savings be increased? We explore a unique policy change in the context of the German pension system to study this question. As of 2005 (with a phase-in period between 2002-04), the German pension administration started to send out annual letters providing detailed and...

We apply the Day Reconstruction Method to compare unemployed and employed people with respect to their subjective assessment of emotional affects, differences in the composition and duration of activities during the course of a day, and their self-reported life satisfaction. Employed persons are...

We use the differences between life satisfaction and emotional well-being of employed and unemployed persons to analyze how a person's employment status affects cognitive well-being. Our results show that unemployment has a negative impact on cognitive, but not on affective well-being, which we...

We use nationally representative data from the UK Time-Use Survey 2014/2015 to investigate how a person's employment status is related to time use and cognitive and affective dimensions of subjective well-being. We find that unemployed persons report substantially lower levels of life...