Increasing wage inequality between similar workers plays an important role for overall inequality trends in industrialized societies. To analyze this pattern, we incorporate directed labor market search into a dynamic model of international trade with heterogeneous firms and homogeneous workers....

Corporate tax reforms carried out in EU countries since 1980 entail lower statutory tax rates and reductions in generous tax depreciation provisions. Several countries including the UK have reduced tax rates for SMEs. This study compares incentive effects of such reforms on the SMEs’...

COVID-19 hit firms by surprise. In a high frequency, representative panel of German firms, the business outlook declined and business uncertainty increased only when the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic led to domestic policy changes: The announcement of nation-wide school closures on March 13...

In this paper, we zoom in on the firm level of German merchandise foreign trade, using a novel data base with information on the export and import value by firm, country, product and year for the period 2011-2019. Problems arising from the consolidated reporting of taxable entities and the...

The minimum wage rate has been introduced in many countries as a means of alleviating the poverty of the working poor. This paper shows, however, that an imperfectly enforced minimum wage rate causes small firms to face an upward-sloping labor supply schedule. Since this turns these firms into...