In view of rising wage inequality and increasing poverty, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of the introduction of a nationwide legal minimum wage of € 7.5 per hour on the basis of a...

We analyze the effect of imposed benefit sanctions on the unemployment-to-employment transition of unemployed people entitled to unemployment compensation on the basis of register data from the German Federal Employment Agency. We combine propensity score matching with a discrete-time hazard...

In this paper we forecast the annual growth rates of the real GDP for each of the 16 German Länder (States) simultaneously. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in the literature that addresses this question for all German Länder as most of the studies try to forecast the...

In view of rising wage and income inequality, the introduction of a legal minimum wage has recently become an important policy issue in Germany. We analyze the distributional effects of a nationwide legal minimum wage of 7.50 € per hour on the basis of a microsimulation model which accounts...

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political...

The paper aims at measuring the rental housing market regulations in Germany between 1913 and 2015. Four classes of housing policy are considered: Rent controls, tenant protection, rationing of housing, and fostering of social housing. Based on a thorough analysis of federal and regional...

The paper evaluates the quality of the German national accounting data (GDP and its use-side components) as measured by the magnitude and dispersion of the forecast/revision errors. It is demonstrated that government consumption series are the least reliable, whereas real GDP and real private...

In this paper we perform a comparative study of the forecasting properties of the alternative leading indicators for Germany using the growth rates of German real GDP. We use the post-unification data which cover years from 1991 through 2004. We detect a structural break in the growth rates that...