Entrepreneurial activity is often regarded as an engine for economic growth and job creation. Through tax policy, governments possess a potential lever to influence the decisions of economic agents to start and close small businesses. In Germany, the top marginal income tax rates were reduced...

We estimate a dynamic structural life-cycle model of employment, non-employment and retirement that includes endogenous accumulation of human capital and intertemporal non-separabilities in preferences. Additionally, the model accounts for the effect of the tax and transfer system on work...

In this paper, we define a new class of richness measures. In contrast to the often used headcount, these new measures are sensitive to changes in rich persons' income and therefore allow for a more sophisticated analysis of richness. We demonstrate the application of these new measures to...

An emerging literature on international activities of heterogeneous firms documents that exporting firms are more productive than firms that only sell on the national market. This positive exporter productivity premium shows up in a large number of empirical studies after controlling for...

Positive assortative matching implies that high productivity workers and firms match together. However, there is almost no evidence of a positive correlation between the worker and firm contributions in two-way fixed-effects wage equations. This could be the result of a bias caused by standard...

In this paper, we investigate how changes in the skill mix of local labor supply are absorbed by the economy. We distinguish between three adjustment mechanisms: through factor prices, through an expansion in the size of those production units that use the more abundant skill group more...

COVID-19 hit firms by surprise. In a high frequency, representative panel of German firms, the business outlook declined and business uncertainty increased only when the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic led to domestic policy changes: The announcement of nation-wide school closures on March 13...

We estimate wage and job tenure functions that include individual and firm effects capturing time-invariant unobserved worker and firm heterogeneity using German linked employer-employee data (LIAB data set). We find that both types of heterogeneity are correlated to the observed characteristics...

Using comprehensive data for West Germany, this paper investigates the determinants of establishment exit. We find that between 1975 and 2006 the average exit rate has risen considerably. In order to test various "liabilities" of establishment survival identified in the literature, we analyze...

The success of the flat rate tax in Eastern Europe suggests that this concept could also be amodel for the welfare states of Western Europe. The present paper uses a simulation modelto analyse the effects of revenue neutral flat rate tax reforms on equity and efficiency for thecase of Germany...