Should two-band income taxes be progressive given a general income distribution? Weprovide a negative answer under utilitarian and max-min welfare functions. While this resultclarifies some ambiguities in the literature, it does not rule out progressive taxes in general. Ifwe maximize total or...

Data sets from car insurance companies often have a high-dimensional complex dependency structure. The use of classical statistical methods such as generalized linear models or Tweedie?s compound Poisson model can yield problems in this case. Christmann (2004) proposed a general approach to...

The paper evaluates the quality of the German national accounting data (GDP and its use-side components) as measured by the magnitude and dispersion of the forecast/revision errors. It is demonstrated that government consumption series are the least reliable, whereas real GDP and real private...

We present the operationalized Toll Index, which is a new type of early indicator for the German business cycle. We present the basic idea and document the power of the indicator for the purpose of nowcasting. The data will be regularly available at the IDSC, the data bank center of IZA and will...

The paper presents the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS), which is one of the most widely used household and labor force surveys in Eastern Europe. It is based on a statistically representative sample of the Ukrainian population aged between 15 and 72 years, comprising about 4,000...

Many factors inhibiting and facilitating economic growth have been suggested. Will international income data tell which matter when all are treated symmetrically a priori? We find that growth determinants emerging from agnostic Bayesian model averaging and classical model selection procedures...

This paper uses index number theory to disentangle changes in aggregate retail interest rates due to changes in individual component rates (“interest rate effect”) from those caused by changes in the weights of each component (“weight effect”), on the basis of the “difference” index...

External statistics – specifically balance of payments and international investment position statistics – are among the primary statistics on which policy-making bodies and markets rely as a basis for their decisions in globalised economies. Monitoring and enhancing data quality in the...