Take-up of a social benefit is usually defined as receiving a benefit for which an individual or household is eligible. The take-up rate is the fraction of those eligible for a program who participate and receive a benefit or service. We survey estimates of take-up of social benefits around the...

In democracies, political parties promise to expand social benefits to attract voters in the lead-up to elections. However, we know relatively little whether such campaign promises effectively sway benefiting voters. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we estimate the causal effects of an...

Educational reforms aim to improve education quality and accessibility, creating positive externalities like individual growth and societal benefits. Although the global educational attainment has progressed, disparities still exist. This study applies the four-cell matrix developed by Münich...

Although the phenomenon of the internet only emerged about 25 years ago, it is hard to imagine life without it. More and more people use the available connectivity for both professional and private life, and the number of services grows continuously. This increasing demand for capacity and speed...

While rising unemployment generally reduces people's happiness, researchers argue that there is a compensating social-norm effect for the unemployed individual, who might suffer less when it is more common to be unemployed. This empirical study rejects this thesis for German panel data, however,...

A model is set up where migrants must choose a level of social traits and consumption of ethnic goods. As the consumption level of ethnic goods increases, the migrants become ever more different to the local population and are less assimilated. Less assimilation affects the reaction of the local...

We use detailed, population-wide data from Finland to provide evidence of the impact of earnings disregard policies on part-time work during unemployment spells, and describe the longer-run trends in combining part-time work and social benefits. We find that part-time work while receiving...

On the labour markets, recent decades were characterised by structural supply-side reforms in many countries. Following its hawkish reforms from the 2000s, Germany has recently made a dovish turnaround. Conditions in basic income support for unemployed became more generous. Before, a temporary...

This paper explores if more generous social spending polices in fact lead to less income inequality, or if redistributive outcomes are offset by behavioral disincentive effects. To account for the inherent endogeneity of social policies with regard to inequality levels, I apply the System GMM...

Consumption based equivalence scales are estimated by applying the extended partially linear model (EPLM) to the 1998 Income and Consumption Survey (EVS) of Germany. The chosen flexible semiparametric specification is able to capture a large variety of functional forms of household expenditure...