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...

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...

Eine wachsende Einkommenspolarisierung und die damit verbundene Einkommensspreizung erfahren in der öffentlichen Diskussion eine steigende Aufmerksamkeit. Eine Zunahme der Polarisierung der Einkommen ist nicht nur hinsichtlich des gesellschaftlichen Zusammen-hangs und des Empfindens von...

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...

This Ph.D. thesis consists of three chapters and analyzes how economic structures affect political outcomes. In the first chapter, Uwe Sunde and I develop a model to study the endogenous emergence of political regimes in societies in which productive resources are distributed unequally and...