Based on well-known evidence on labor supply elasticities, several authors have concluded that women should be taxed at lower rates than men. We evaluate the quantitative implications of taxing women at a lower rate than men. Relative to the current system of taxation, setting a proportional tax...

This study designs a natural field experiment linked to a controlled laboratory experiment to examine the effectiveness of matching gifts and challenge gifts, two popular strategies used to secure a portion of the $200 billion annually given to charities. We find evidence that challenge gifts...

Much is known about private returns to education in the form of higher earnings. Less is known about social value, over and above the private, market value. Associations between education and socially-desirable outcomes are strong, but disentangling the effect of education from other causal...

We analyze the welfare cost of inflation in a model with cash-in-advance constraints and an endogenous distribution of establishments' productivities. Inflation distorts aggregate productivity through firm entry dynamics. The model is calibrated to the United States economy and the long-run...

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use CEX repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to...

Empirical analyses of the effects of public and private pensions on household saving impose strong assumptions in order to obtain a tractable empirical model: fixed retirement and pension claiming ages, no borrowing constraint, little or no uncertainty, and no institutional restrictions on...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

Der vorliegende Diskussionsbeitrag entstand im Rahmen eines Forschungsprojektes über die monetäre Integration von fünf mittel- und osteuropäischen EU-Beitrittskandidaten (Polen, Tschechische Republik, Ungarn, Slowenien und Estland). Das hier vorgestellte Kapitel geht auf die...

In the European Union the commission has the primary right to decide about industrial policy. Note that this includes the possibility to allow actions of member countries as long as these are not in conflict with the interest of the EU. This paper deals with the question whether such an...