The paper studies the design of couples income taxation when consumption and labor supply decisions within the couple are made in a cooperative way according to some bargaining scheme. Specifically, the couple maximizes a weighted sum of the spouses utilities. In the first part of the paper, the...

Germany has the lowest birth rate among all OECD countries. To encourage fertility, the federal government has recently introduced a set of reforms that led to a substantial expansion of public child care for under three year old children. Using administrative county-level data, we exploit...

Although discrete hours choice models have become the workhorse in labor supply analyses. Yet, they are often criticized for being a black box due to their numerous underlying modeling assumptions, with respect to, e.g., the functional form, unobserved error components or several exogeneity...

This paper studies the impact of the state-dependent risk of a government default on the correlation of the scal balance and current account. We use a small open economy model where nonlinear risk premia arise endogenously when the government operates close to its scal limit, i.e. the maximum...

We apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of preference heterogeneity, derived from structural labour supply models. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of...

Empirical studies on minimum wages are primarily concerned with employment while their effects on income inequality receive less attention. Yet, a popular argument for a federal minimum wage in Germany is that it will prevent in-work poverty and reduce income inequality. We examine this...

This research analyses retirement behaviour in Austria based on a combined administrative dataset. Data from the Austrian social security database is merged with a dataset that contains very detailed information on all pension-relevant information on the individual level, e.g. insurance records...

In August 2013, two child care reforms have come into effect at the same time: First, a legal claim to formal child care has been introduced for all children aged one year or older. Second, a new benefit called Betreuungsgeld has been introduced that is granted to families who do not use public...

Complementary to microsimulation studies focusing on the impact of labor supply as a choice of hours worked we shed light on another variable that survey data are not capable of taking into account: the choice of work effort. Our aim is to investigate the effect of individual and joint taxation...

This paper examines recent trends in employment patterns on the labor market for youth and changing returns to early employment stability over the past four decades. True state dependence is identified by exploiting exogenous variation in aggregate labor market conditions induced by differences...