We study optimal nonlinear taxation of labor income and linear taxation of capital income in a life-cycle framework with private information and idiosyncratic risk. We focus on simple history-independent tax instruments. We first analyze the welfare losses from this simplification as compared to...

We study education and income tax policies in a model with endogenous selection into college. Our framework is strongly influenced by the empirical college literature and incorporates heterogenous returns and tastes for college, earnings risk (implying uncertain returns to college) and...

Many governments set up large public preschool programs in order to expand ac- cess to early education (crowd-in). Public preschools, however, tend to crowd-out private preschool enrollment. This makes such programs less cost-effective because public finances are used to pay for preschool for...

This paper estimates the effects of regional mobility on individual employment prospects and wages, exploiting rich German social security data spanning over 30 years. Our focus is on unemployed workers with strong labor force attachment who search for employment after being exposed to a mass...

The unprecedented economic rise of Eastern Europe and China in the last two decades has triggered concerns in developed Western market economies about adverse effects for domestic labor markets trough increased import competition. Simultaneously, exports from developed countries to these new...

This paper addresses the impact of rising international trade exposure on individual earnings profiles in heterogeneous worker-establishment matches. We exploit rich panel data on job biographies of manufacturing workers in Germany, and apply a high-dimensional fixed effects approach to analyze...

We study and compare the importance of human capital acquired at different stages of the life-cycle. We exploit Germany’s unique reunification episode and the sudden restructuring of East Germany’s labor market institutions and education system. We show graphical evidence that earnings,...