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...

We calculate the expected distributional effects of the European Emissions Trading System combining industry and household-level data. By combining data on direct CO2 emissions by production sector from the German Environmental Account with the German Input-Output Accounts, we calculate the CO2...

The life-cycle hypothesis implies that consumption would not decline at retirement. However, several studies found relevant declines in food consumption after retirement for the United States. Others concluded that this contradiction of the life-cycle hypothesis is solved by allowing for broader...

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 popular argument for a federal minimum wage is that it will prevent in-work poverty and reduce income inequality. We examine this assertion for Germany, a welfare state with a relative generous means-tested social minimum and high marginal tax rates. Our analysis is based on a microsimulation...

This study assesses the burden of capital income tax passed onto labor through wage bargaining over economic rents, using estimations based on a unique pseudo-panel data set from Germany for the period 1998 to 2006. Tax return data cover the universe of corporations subject to corporate income...

We analyze guest-workers' expected duration of stay in Germany within an econometric model taking into account the important distinction between permanent and temporary stayers, where the expected duration of stay for the latter is differentiated in short-term, medium-term and long-term stayers....

The development of the West German earnings distribution in the 1980's is analysed on the basis of both the German Socio-Economic Panel and micro-data from the Employment Register of the Federal Labour Office. We find that earnings inequality in Germany has increased very little in the 1980's,...

This paper follows up recent work on the relationship between (un)employment and wage effects of social security financing undertaken by the OECD Jobs Study. Based on a simple macroeconometric model of the labour market, I investigate whether the peculiar OECD results for Germany on the...