Flexible work arrangements such as allowing employees to work at home are used in fi rms, especially since information and communication technologies have become so widespread. Using individual-level data from 10,884 German employees, this paper analyses the determinants of working at home as a...

The objective of our analysis is to find out whether an increase in working time without pay compensation can be considered an adequate policy to reduce unemployment. From the perspective of economic theory, the outcome is in general ambiguous: On the one hand, as the increase in working time...

Based on survey responses from more than 1,700 managers in Germany, this study elicits employers’ perceptions of working from home during COVID-19 and their long-term expectations for the time after the pandemic. Based on employers’ forecasts of the share of employees working from home...

Working from home (WfH) has become much more common since the early 2000s. We exploit the German Socio-Economic Panel between 1997 and 2014 to investigate how such a work arrangement affects labour market outcomes and life satisfaction. We find that childless employees work an extra hour per...

The recent shift towards working from home (WFH) has far-reaching implications for social and economic outcomes. While firms are gatekeepers for the ongoing diffusion of flexible work arrangements, there is little evidence on how firms decide to offer WFH. We leverage two survey experiments...

In this paper, we assess the impact of flexible work time schedules on firm efficiency using representative establishment data for Germany. Following the approach by Battese and Coelli (1995), we estimate a stochastic production frontier and the determinants of technical efficiency...

With the purpose to reduce winter unemployment and to promote all-season employment in the constructions sector, Germany maintains an extensive bad weather allowance system. Since the mid 1990s, these regulations have been subject to several reforms that resemble the range of approaches for...

Changes to the degree of a tax system’s progressiveness are a key element of many introduced or considered tax reforms. Especially, flat tax reforms have received increasing attention resulting from their popularity among Eastern European countries. Proponents claim that their simplicity and...

This paper provides a quantitative review of the empirical literature on profit-shifting behavior of multinational firms. We synthesize the evidence from 25 studies and find a substantial response of profit measures to international tax rate differentials. Accounting for misspecification biases...

Aggressive tax planning efforts of highly profitable multinational companies (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS)) have become the subject of intense public debate in recent years. As a response, several international initiatives and parties have called for more transparency in financial...