We estimate the effects of the reform of the German Unemployment Insurance that replaced the wage related Unemployment Assistance with an income maintenance program and stronger means testing. We model the tax-benefit system and use the Socio-Economic Panel. We estimate a discrete labour supply...

Social assistance and unemployment assistance, which provide means tested income support (social welfare) without pre-specified time limits, are viewed as one important reason for the persistently high level of unemployment in Germany by many economists. In order to increase work incentives and,...

This paper compares predictions obtained for the analysis of tax reforms with collective and unitary models of household labour supply and consumption behaviour. We simulate real world microdata by means of a collective approach, using a compound procedure of estimation and calibration based on...

We compare two options of integrating discrete working time choice of heterogenous households into a general equilibrium model. The first, known from the literature, produces household heterogeneity through a working time preference parameter. We contrast this with a model that directly...

We report empirical evidence from the first field experiments to be conducted in Germany with program and control groups between 1999 and 2002. The evaluated program called ?Targeted Negative Income Tax (TNIT)? is a time-restricted employee subsidy for means-tested welfare recipients. We focus...

The labor supply of West German married and cohabiting couples is analyzed using a discrete choice model. Following van Soest (1995), the labor supply decision is based on a household utility function which is determined by the leisure of the two spouses and net household income. Furthermore,...

Total employment in Germany is supposed to increase if people could realize their desired working hours. However, this back-of-the-envelope calculation overestimates the effect of loosening hours constraints, because even in a very flexible labor market there will exist hours restrictions for...

This paper investigates the relationship between personality traits and female labor force participation. While research on the role of cognitive skills for individual labor market success has a long tradition in economics, comparatively little is known about the channels through which...

The elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is often interpreted as a sufficient statistic to assess the welfare costs of taxation. Building on the conceptual framework of Chetty (2009), we show that this assertion does no longer hold for tax systems with deduction possibilities if (i) deductions...

We estimate the effects of the reform of the German Unemployment Insurance that replaced the wage related Unemployment Assistance with an income maintenance program and stronger means testing. We model the tax-benefit system and use the Socio-Economic Panel. We estimate a discrete labour supply...