What began as a financial crisis in the United States in 2007-2008 quickly evolved into a massive crisis of the global real economy. We investigate the importance of the bank lending and firm borrowing channel in the international transmission of bank distress to the real economy — in...

We analyze the top tail of the wealth distribution in Germany, France, Spain, and Greece based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be underrepresented in household surveys we integrate the big fortunes from rich lists, estimate a Pareto...

The role and influence of the finance minister within the cabinet are discussed with increasing prominence in the recent theoretical literature on the political economy of budget deficits. It is generally assumed that the spending ministers can raise their reputation purely with new or more...

The German Renewable Energy Act (EEG) has been very successful in promoting the deployment of wind power plants and other renewable energy power generating technologies in Germany. The increasing share of EEG-power in the generation portfolio, increasing amounts of fluctuating power generation,...

The World War I played a key role in shaping modern housing policy. While in the pre-War time virtually no housing policy existed, the beginning of hostilities led to an almost immediate and comprehensive state intervention in the housing market, particularly among those engaged in the war....

This paper empirically investigates the effects of differential income taxation on households' portfolio choice and asset allocation applying a two-stage budgeting model of asset demand to German survey data. The model is structured into the discrete asset choice and the continuous asset choice,...

The empirical finding that entrepreneurs tend to invest a large share of their wealth in their own firms despite comparably low returns and high risk has become known as the private equity premium puzzle. This paper provides evidence supporting the hypothesis that lower risk aversion of...

Signature requirements are often used as hurdles to prevent overuse of public referenda. We evaluate the causal effect of lowering signature requirements on the number of observed citizen initiatives. Based on municipality-level data for Germany, we make use of legislative changes at specific...

A shortage of skilled labor and low female labor market participation are problems many developed countries have to face. Beside activating inactive women, one possible solution is to support the re-integration of unemployed women. Due to female-specific labor market constraints (preferences for...

We estimate the impact of effective profit taxation on the financial leverage of corporations on the basis of a pseudo-panel constructed from corporate tax return micro data for the period 1998-2001, a period which saw the introduction of a major corporate tax reform in Germany. The financial...