Within the actual economic and social policy discussion an increasing tax and duties burden is the subject. Before new tax laws and impact analyses of tax changes can be considered, an analysis of the actual tax burden of different societal groups is necessary. In addition, a problemoriented...

We study how a bank credit crunch—a dramatic worsening of firm and consumer access to bank credit, such as the one observed over the Great Recession—translates into job losses in U.S. manufacturing industries. To identify the impact of the recent credit crunch, we rely on differences in the...

We study how a mortgage reform that exogenously increased access to credit had an impact on entrepreneurship, using individual-level micro data from Denmark. The reform allows us to disentangle the role of credit access from wealth effects that typically confound analyses of the collateral...

To sustain growth in an aging economy, it is important to ease the financing of small firms by bank loans. Using bank internal data of small business loans in Germany, we examine the determinants of loan rates in the period 1995-2010. Beyond characteristics of the firm, the loan contract, and...

In December 2010, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh passed a law that severely restricted the operations of micro-finance institutions and brought the micro-finance industry to an abrupt halt. We measure the impact of micro-credit withdrawal in this unique natural experiment and find that...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we present an up-to-date assessment of the differences across euro area countries in the distributions of various measures of debt conditional on household characteristics. We consider three different outcomes: the probability of holding debt, the amount...

One suggested hypothesis for the dramatic rise in household borrowing that preceded the financial crisis is that low-income households increased their demand for credit to finance higher consumption expenditures in order to "keep up" with higherincome households. Using household level data on...

This paper analyzes insurance demand under prospect theory in a simple model with two states of the world and fair insurance contracts. We argue that two different reference points are reasonable in this framework, state-dependent initial wealth or final wealth after buying full insurance....

The relative popularity of adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) and fixed-rate mortgages (FRMs) varies considerably both across countries and over time. We ask how movements in current and expected future interest rates affect the share of ARMs in total mortgage issuance. Using a nine-country panel...

We investigate full prepayments of Japanese residential mortgages during a ten-year period from 1996 to 2005. This investigation is important because the amount of mortgages outstanding in Japan is huge, yet the study on their prepayments is very limited. This period from 1996 to 2005 was...