Several German states recently introduced tuition fees for university education. We investigate whether these tuition fees influence the mobility of university applicants. Based on administrative data of applicants for medical schools in Germany, we estimate the effect of tuition fees on the...

Following a landmark ruling by the Constitutional Court in 2005, more than half of Germany's universities started charging tuition fees, which also applied to incumbent students. We exploit this unusual lack of grandfathering together with register data covering the universe of students to show...

We evaluate the effect of the federal students? financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) on enrolment rates into higher education by exploiting the exogenous variation introduced through a discrete shift in the repayment regulations. Supported students had to repay the full loan until 1990....

Students from low-income families are eligible to student aid under the federal students? financial assistance scheme (BAfoeG) in Germany. We evaluate the effectiveness of a recent reform of student aid that substantially increased the amount received by eligible students to raise enrolment...

The study aims to assess the distributional effects of taxing financial transactions including a focus on gender. It specifically investigates the impact of the low interest rate environment on tax revenues and distribution. The first part of the study is explorative, aiming to develop a concept...

This paper provides evidence over a long time period on the question of who bears the burden of social security contributions (SSC) in Germany. Following Alvaredo et al. (2016) we exploit kinks in the budget set generated by a drop in the marginal SSC rate at earnings caps. Based on...

This paper shows that the welfare dominance of ad valorem over unit taxes under imperfect competition, extends to the Dixit-Stiglitz framework with differentiated products, entry and love of variety. This contrasts against findings by Anderson et al. (J Public Econ, 2001) made in a similar...

In 2013, around 121 billion US-Dollar were spend worldwide to promote the investment into renewable energy sources. The most prominent support scheme employed is a feed-in tariff, which guarantees a fixed price for electricity produced by renewable energies sources, usually for around 15 years...

We estimate economic incidence of social security contributions (SSC) on the basis of cross-sectional earnings distributions. The approach exploits discontinuities in earnings distributions at kinks in the budget set which are informative about tax incidence. Contrary to most research on SSC...

We examine how competition affects VAT pass-through in isolated oligopolistic markets as defined by the Greek islands. Using daily gasoline prices and a difference-in-differences methodology, we investigate how changes in VAT rates are passed through to consumers in islands with different market...