We demonstrate that upward-looking comparisons induce "keeping up with the richer Joneses"-behavior. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the effect of reference consumption, defined as the consumption level of all households who are perceived to be richer, on household...

This paper investigates the contribution of managers to gender gaps and analyzes whether the over-representation of men in management positions puts women at a disadvantage. Relying on personnel data from one of the largest European manufacturing firms, we separate out the factors explaining...

We want to explain the rise of household debt in the US since 1980. We present a mechanism that is consistent with the following stylized facts: (i) Real mortgage debt, (ii) debt-service-to-income ratios and (iii) house sizes (in sqft) have increased since the 1980 across all income quintiles....

The elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is often interpreted as a sufficient statistic to assess the welfare costs of taxation. Building on the conceptual framework of Chetty (2009), we show that this assertion does no longer hold for tax systems with deduction possibilities if (i) deductions...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...

Closely following recent innovations in the literature on the multidimensional measurement of poverty, this paper provides similar measures for the top of the distribution using a dual cutoff method to identify persons, who can be considered as rich in a multidimensional setting. Thereby, the...

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...

In this paper we provide empirical evidence on the wage incidence of the German business tax, which is set at the municipal level. For our analysis, we use very rich administrative linked employer-employee panel data, covering 11 years, and link it to data on the business tax rates of about...

One central lesson of the sovereign debt crisis is that the Eurozone (and the EU) needs institutional reform. Many observers argue that the monetary union should be complemented by a fiscal union . In this paper we provide the first quantitative analysis of important economic effects of an EU...