We quantify the private and fiscal lifetime returns to higher education in Germany accounting for the redistribution through the tax-and-transfer system, cohort effects, and the effect of income pooling within households. For this purpose we build a dynamic microsimulation model that simulates...

To counteract the financial pressure emerging in aging societies, statutory pay-as-you-go pension schemes are undergoing fundamental reforms in many Western countries. Starting with cohort 1937, Germany introduced permanent pension deductions for early retirement. This paper examines the...

This paper presents long term projections of the German pension system that are based on a general equilibrium model with overlapping generations (OLG). This framework takes into account the two way feedback of both micro and macroeconomic relationships, meaning that households, for example,...

The currently observed demographic change consists of two independent develop-ments that differ in structure and persistence: (1) A slow, monotonic and (presum-ably) permanent ageing effect caused by an increasing life expectancy; (2) a morerapidly changing, non-monotonic and less permanent...

This paper assesses how a permanent shift from financing a public pay-as-you-go pension by direct (labour income) taxation towards financing it by indirect(consumption) taxation affects the economy and welfare. To this end, we use anoverlapping-generations-augmented two-region general...

I propose a method to decompose changes in income inequality into the contributions of policy changes, wage rate changes, and population changes while considering labor supply reactions. Using data from the Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), I apply this method to decompose the increase in income...

Governmental activities in welfare states influence private charitable giving predominantly in two ways: (1) government spending on the provision of public goods may cause crowding out of private charitable contributions; and (2) tax incentives may boost private charitable giving. For a rich...

This paper provides new empirical insights on the elasticity of taxable income to the net-oftax rate. Using a panel of German income tax return data, we followed taxpayers from 2001 to 2006 to analyze the effects of the German tax reforms of 2004 and 2005. Implementing a dynamic model as...

We estimate the elasticity of charitable giving with respect to price and income changes using a rich panel of income tax returns covering the period 2001 to 2006. Employing censored quantile regression and exploiting the panel structure, the advantage of our analysis is twofold: First, we...