Gas exports to the Continent are regulated by long term take-or-pay contracts. The contracts are described and analyzed. We thereafter examine whether the most central European gas market, the German market, is integrated. Are there substantial price differences between gas from different export...

This paper exploits a quasi-natural experiment to study the effect of social benefits level on take-up rates. We find that households who are eligible for double benefits (twins) have much higher take-up rate - up to double - as compared to a control group of households. Our estimated effect of...

The impacts of introducing or tightening time limits on welfare use are studied in an efficiency wage model. Those losing access to regular benefits receive some smaller benefit, which can be interpreted as food stamps. Stricter time limits raise both employment and profits and generally reduce...

Social assistance in Germany reduces the incentive to work. The U.S. Welfare to Work Programm tries to avoid such distinctives. It consists essentially of two elements: the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for employees in low wage occupations and a workfare model. The EITC and the Workfare model...

An important issue in public policy debates is the effect of international migration on welfare in source and host countries. We address this issue by constructing a general equilibrium model of a two-class source or host country. Each country produces many traded and non-traded goods, uses...

Germany is in a dilemma. Low wage competition via product and factor markets increases the demands on the welfare state, but increased systems competition in the context of international factor mobility reduces the possibilities of maintaining it. The welfare states has important allocation...

A political miracle occurred when Germany was reunited, and at first glance an economic miracle has followed. Real incomes in the east have now reached the western level, and investment per capita has been much higher than in the west. However, every third deutschmark spent in the east has been...

The longitudinal, 1988-89, LMAS makes it possible to study the interaction between social assistance and labour supply while allowing for substantial time dependence. Tobit equations for hours worked on and off social assistance, which allow for endogenous selection of social assistance status,...

Tax competition is supposed to lead to inefficiencies in the provision of public goods and difficulties for decentralized redistribution. A necessary condition for these effects to occur is that residence and location decisions are determined by fiscal considerations. In this paper, the impact...

Two macro models - one for a closed economy and the other for a small open economy - are used to examine the scope for income redistribution and employment creation. In particular, the introduction of both a guaranteed annual income (basic income) and an employment subsidy are examined, and...