Different stochastic simulation methods are used in order to check the robustness of the outcome of policy simulations with a macroeconometric model. A macroeconometric disequilibriummodel of the West German economy is used to analyze a reform proposal for the tax system. The model was estimated...

The amendment to the German Trade and Crafts Code in 2004 offers a natural experiment to asses the causal effects of this reform on the probabilities of being self-employed and transition into and out of self-employment, using cross-sections (2002-2006) of German microcensus data. This study...

Recently, integrating Transaction Cost Economic (TCE) and Resource Based View (RBV) arguments has become one of the most prominent theoretical approaches in research on business relationships. We question this dominance and strengthen an exclusive TCE perspective by recalling two of the core TCE...

Since 2002 the German government seeks to stimulate private retirement savings by means of special allowances and tax exemptions - the so-called Riester scheme. We apply matching and panel regression techniques to assess the impact of the Riester scheme on households' propensities to save in a...

We analyze the distributive justice of the combined burden of taxes, social security contributions and public transfers on employee households. In order to investigate whether the treatment of families by the aggregate tax-benefit system can be regarded as "fair" we compare the equivalent...

Interpersonal relations are shaped by the judgements associated with the social categories that individuals perceive in their social contacts. I develop a model of how those judgments form based on a theory of symbolic values. The model depicts the interaction between two values, one associated...

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...