We suggest a political economy explanation for the stylized fact that intragenerationally more redistributive social security systems are smaller. We relate the stylized fact to an "efficiency-redistribution" trade-off to be resolved by political process. The inefficiency of social security...

In this paper, I estimate the fiscal impact of immigrants on the German pension insurance (PI) and unemployment insurance (UI) systems when return migration is an endogenous choice. For this purpose, I develop a dynamic stochastic model of joint return migration and saving decisions that...

This paper develops a generalized hedonic model in which an exogenous shock to a single product attribute can affect other attributes, the markets for the product's complements and substitutes, and aggregate quantity produced. These factors are shown to be empirically relevant and to cause bias...

Aggregate wages display little cyclicality compared to what a standard model would predict. Wage rigidities are an obvious candidate but a recent strand of the literature has emphasized the need to take into account the growing importance of worker composition effects during downturns. With...

We provide new evidence of forward-looking labor supply responses to changes in pension wealth. We exploit a 2014 German reform that increased pension wealth for mothers by an average of 4.4% per child born before January 1, 1992. Using administrative data on the universe of working histories,...

In Germany, there is an ongoing debate about how to increase the efficiency of the social security system and especially its financing. The aim of this paper is to simulate different financing systems for Germany. The introduction of a Liberal British or the Southern Greek financing system...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of occupational training programs for the unemployed before and after the substantial amendments in German labor market legislation known as Hartz reforms. Based on the official evaluation of the reforms, we show that program impacts vary much across...

Due to Federal regulations, automobile air bag availability was a model-specific discontinuous function of model year for used vehicles in the 1990s and early 2000s. We use these discontinuities and the gradual increase in the supply of air bags to trace out the demand curve for air bags and the...

We estimate the effect of an increase in time cost on the return behavior of blood donors. Using data from the Australia Red Cross Blood Service, we ask what happens when pro-social behavior becomes more costly. Exploiting a natural variation in which donor wait times are random, we use the...

Populous communities often prefer more government involvement than less populous communities, but does community size per se affect citizens' preferences for government? Endogeneity commonly prevents testing for causal effects because (i) people can select into communities while (ii) government...