Compulsory military service is still a prominent feature of young people's careers in many countries. We use the abolition of compulsory military and civil service for males in 2011 in Germany as a natural experiment to identify effects of institutionalized career disruptions on life...

We study three budget-neutral reforms of the German tax and transfer system designed to improve work incentives for people with low incomes: a feasible flat tax reform that provides a basic income which is equal to the current level of the means tested unemployment benefit, and two alternative...

A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We reconcile...

Vor dem Hintergrund der sozialen Marktwirtschaft wird Prekarität als eine Folge von arbeitsmarkt- und sozialpolitischen Veränderungen diskutiert. Es wird bilanziert, dass der soziale Zusammenhalt der Arbeitsgesellschaft in Deutschland gefährdet ist. Im Anschluss an diese Diskussion geht die...