It is argued that the concept of well-being inequality cannot be properly defined without taking the reference process into account. The reference effect depends on how frequently individuals compare with others and on the degree of social transparency in society. In this paper we employ the...

Different family types may have a fixed flow of consumption costs related to subsistence needs. We use a survey approach in order to identify and estimate such a fixed component of spending for different families. Our method involves making direct questions about the linkup between aggregate...

This paper is about the impact of clusters on entrepreneurship at the regional level. Defining entrepreneurship as the creation of new organisations and clusters as a geographically proximate group of interconnected firms and associated institutions in related industries, this paper aims to...

Public funding of child care (CC) features prominently in the achievement of several social objectives in Quebec and across Canada. This article provides evidence on the impact of three main measures of public CC funding (the provincial tax credit, the federal income tax deduction, and the...

This paper explores the origin and development of the "consumer choice" paradigm as the core concept of German ordoliberal thought which has had a strong impact on EU competition policy and law. Outside Germany, ordoliberal thought is often identified with the learning of the original "Freiburg...

Social health care systems are inevitably confronted with the scarcity of resources and the resulting distributional challenges. Since prioritization implies distributional effects, decisions on respective rules should take citizens’ preferences into account. Thus, knowledge about citizens’...

We show that measures of inequality of opportunity (IOP) fully consistent with Roemer (1998)'s IOP theory can be straightforwardly estimated by adopting a machine learning approach, and apply our novel method to analyse the development of IOP in Germany during the last three decades. Hereby, we...

Using new data from a three-wave panel survey administered in Germany between May 2020 and May 2021, this paper studies the impact of a negative shock affecting every strata of the population, such as the development of COVID-19, on preferences for redistribution. Exploiting the plausibly...

Individual well-being depends not only on income but also on other dimensions of life, such as health, the quality of social relations and of the environment, employment, and job satisfaction. In this chapter we survey the economic literature on how to construct such overall measures of...

I use the universe of tax returns in Germany and a regression kink design to estimate the impact of the benefit amount available to high-earning women after their first childbirth on subsequent within-couple earnings inequality. Lower benefit amounts result in a reduced earnings gap that...