The gender wage gap is a persistent labor market phenomenon. Most research focuses on the determinants of these wage differences. We contribute to this literature by exploring a different research question: if wages of women are systematically lower than male wages, what are the distributional...

This paper outlines the importance of labor mobility for the improvement in allocating and distributing economic resources. We are faced with an increasing lack of skilled workers and a growing tendency of unemployment amongst the low-skilled. A central political objective for the future will...

This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced monetary policy in OECD countries. We use quarterly data in the 1980.1-2005.4 period and exclude EMU countries. Our Taylor-rule specification focuses on the interactions of a new time-variant index of central bank independence with...

This paper examines the contemporaneous relationship between the exchange rate regime and structural economic reforms for a sample of CEEC/CIS transition countries. We investigate empirically whether structural reforms are complements or substitutes for monetary commitment in the attempt to...

Financial support for families with children implies inherent trade-offs some of which are less obvious than others. In the end these trade-offs determine the effectiveness of policy with respect to the material situation of families and employment of their parents. We analyse several kinds of...

We conduct detailed analysis of the Polish Household Budget Survey data for the years 2006-2011 with the focus on its representativeness from the point of view of microsimulation analysis. We find important discrepancies between the data weighted with baseline grossing-up weights and official...

This paper extends previous research about the determinants of reservation wages by analysing the effect of progressive income taxation on the ratio between reservation and net market wages. Based on micro data for Germany (SOEP) we show that joint income taxation in Germany which discriminates...

In Germany the foreign born population is made up of foreigners and so called ”ethnic Germans” who migrated from eastern European countries to Germany. While the first group is confronted with problems arising from the typical German concept of ethnicity and citizenship, the latter are...

Income is an important determinant of individual standards of living and participation in social life. Data from the German Socio-Economic Panel shows that the level of income also affects a person's health and life expectancy. People's self-assessment of their health and health-related quality...

The paper seeks to add to the existing literature on aggregate and private savings by focusing on transition economies. We use panel data over the period 1989-1998 and estimate a fixed-effects model. In Central Eastern European Countries, aggregate and private savings are driven by almost the...