To tackle mass unemployment and increase participation rates, the German government over recent years has mainly focused on supply side strategies, including 'making work pay' policies. The 2003 Mini-Job reform introduced an extended subsidy of social security contributions for low wage workers....

Estimates of labour supply effects of recent UK reforms in the area of direct taxes and benefits show that policy can have significant influence on the level of employment. We confirm this in a simulation of in-work support system introduced into the German tax and benefit system. Our simulation...

The aim of this paper is to apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of random utility models of labour supply. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of the...

In this paper we empirically derive the welfare effects of a shift from joint taxation with full income splitting to a revenue neutral system of individual taxation in Germany. For the empirical welfare evaluation we estimate the preference heterogeneity in the population and use normative...

Staatliche Instrumente zur Beschäftigungsförderung und Einkommenssicherung im Niedriglohnbereich durch Kombilohn-Modelle existieren auch in Deutschland schon seit längerem und wurden im Zuge der jüngsten Arbeitsmarktreformen ausgeweitet. Diese haben das Ziel, durch eine einkommensabhängige...

We compute participation tax rates across the EU and find that work disincentives inherent in tax-benefit systems largely depend on household composition and the individual's earner role within the household. We then estimate participation elasticities using an IV group estimator that enables us...

In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in postwar German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. Drawing on data of the GSOEP, we analyze the distributional and fiscal effects of the tax reform. Our analysis employs microsimulation...

We analyze potential labor supply effects of a shift from the current German system of joint taxation of married couples to a system of limited real income splitting on the basis of an econometric household labor supply model embedded in a tax-benefit model. Our simulation results show...

In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in postwar German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. An important aim of this tax reform was to improve work incentives and, thereby, foster employment. Drawing on data of the German Socio...

In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in post-war German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. One central aim of this tax reform was to improve work incentives and, thereby, foster employment. In this paper, I estimate an intertemporal...