The article is concerned with understanding the impact of social preferences and wealth inequality on aggregate economic outcomes. We investigate how different manifestations of other-regarding preferences affect incentive contracts at the microeconomic level and how these in turn translate into...

This paper uses a simple model based on the board game Monopoly to analyze the drivers of house prices and wealth inequality. Simulations show that inequality generally builds up fast even if players have equal starting conditions and house prices are stable; rising house prices imply more...

Previous literature on the distributional impact of the minimum wage in Germany has either focused on earnings and hourly wages (Caliendo et al., 2017), or is based on exante simulations (Müller and Steiner, 2013). This paper provides systematic descriptive ex-post evidence on the...

In a survey experiment conducted in Germany, we investigate how preferences over both the financing and the provision of redistributive policies are affected by poverty and immigration. We find that while information about poverty has no detectable impact on the progressivity of the respondents'...

I study tax avoidance along the income distribution based on micro data from the Income and Consumption Survey (EVS) for the year 2013. The richness of the survey concerning income, taxes and expenditures is exploited by modelling the German tax code in terms of the items available in the EVS....

The traditional concept of a strict minimum of nontaxable income equal for all taxpayers embedded in most current income-tax systems is the result of a paradox of fiscal egalitarianism. The paper shows that substituting the traditional notion of a strict minimum of nontaxable income for a scheme...

We develop a model of a city populated by heterogeneous agents. Agents self-select into entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs set up firms which hire workers. We characterize the equilibrium matching between firms and workers, as well as the within-city assignment of agents to locations. We then...