This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person?s actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

Many studies have estimated the effect of circumstances on income acquisition. Perhaps surprisingly, the fraction of inequality attributable to circumstances is usually quite small - in the advanced democracies, on the order of 20%. One reason for this is the lack of data on circumstance...

Public financial support for firm-level Research and Innovation (R&I) can generate important socio-economic returns. This is especially true if firms use this support to develop radical innovation, defined as new-to-market goods and services. However, radical innovation is risky, and prone to...

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person?s actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

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...

This paper evaluates the linkage between social security strategies and redistributive effects in EU social transfer systems. It is argued that the various European systems produce different patterns of redistribution that may be explained by the adoption of different mixes of social security...

This paper advocates the cautious and constitutional evolution of existing basic income schemes (?unemployment benefit II?) and Targeted Negative Income Tax (TNIT = "Einstiegsgeld") into a means-tested combi-wage model for the future long-term unemployed (gradualism strategy). The paper argues...

Wie lässt sich die Grundsicherung in Deutschland effizienter und gerechter ausgestalten, wenn das Arbeitslosengeld II aus politischen Gründen nicht generell gesenkt werden soll und keine zusätzlichen unteren Lohngruppen durch die Tarifpartner vereinbart werden? Das Mannheimer...

Assar Lindbeck has pointed to the problem that generous welfare state institutions may in the long-run undermine those social norms which limit the costs and incentives effects of the welfare state and thus guarantee its viability. This study is the first to assess the empirical validity of...

This paper analyses the distributive impacts of various regulatory and institutional settings of European schemes of social assistance. For this purpose, two sets of classifications of European schemes of social assistance are introduced that classify the systems according to regulatory...