People tend to contribute to a charity only when they are asked to. Although this so-called 'power of asking' is a well-known technique among fundraisers, the existing literature does not pay much attention to the role of donation requests in charitable giving. This paper uses a unique data set,...

This study explores the interaction between professional imprinting and age in the context of industry-science collaboration. Specifically, we examine the impact of localized and personal peer effects on academics’ involvement with industry and how these effects are moderated by the career age...

Previous estimates of inequality of opportunity (IOp) are lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed characteristics beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. Knowing the true size of unfair IOp, however, is important for the acceptance of (some) inequality and...

We estimate the elasticities of the most important tax categories using a new quarterly database of discretionary tax measures for the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom over the period 1980Q1 to 2018Q2. Employing Romer and Romer's (2009) narrative approach, we construct a...

Previous estimates of inequality of opportunity (IOp) are lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed characteristics beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. Knowing the true size of unfair IOp, however, is important for the acceptance of (some) inequality and...

We estimate the elasticities of the most important tax categories using a new quarterly database of discretionary tax measures for the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom over the period 1980Q1 to 2018Q2. Employing Romer and Romer’s (2009) narrative approach, we construct a...

This paper uses all Value Added Tax (VAT) changes across all EU Member States from 1988 to 2016 to estimate the effect of VATs on trade flows. We find small elasticities of trade flows with respect to VATs, in spite of some of the VAT changes being substantial. We estimate substantially smaller...

The empirical literature using vector autoregressive models to assess the effects of fiscal policy shocks strongly disagrees on even the qualitative response of key macroeconomic variables to government spending and tax shocks. We provide new evidence for the U.S. over the period 1955-2006. We...

This paper explores whether more generous social spending polices in fact lead to less income inequality, or if redistributive outcomes are offset by behavioral disincentive effects. To account for the inherent endogeneity of social policies with regard to inequality levels, I apply the System...

This paper explores if more generous social spending polices in fact lead to less income inequality, or if redistributive outcomes are offset by behavioral disincentive effects. To account for the inherent endogeneity of social policies with regard to inequality levels, I apply the System GMM...