There is a successful and growing number of studies published in top-economics journals that exploit the division and re-unification of Germany as a natural experiment for analysing the effects of political regimes on economic behaviour. One strand of the literature shows that socialism shaped...

We analyse the distributional effects of increased oil excises in Belgium by combining a regional Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model with a microsimulation framework that exploits the rich detail of household-level data. The results suggest that policymakers face an equity-efficiency...

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...

Using representative survey data collected in 2018, I study how laypersons in Germany perceive the effects of quantitative easing (QE) on their personal financial situation and on national economic inequality. Almost 40% think that their economic situation is unaffected by QE, whereas 20% and 6%...

This paper studies the causal effect of giving first birth and how that effect changes by the 2007 reform in parental benefits in Germany. We further investigate how the reform affects the selection of women into motherhood and how that selection effect affects labor market outcomes. A large...

This paper proposes three theoretical mechanisms through which polygyny may be related to social unrest. The mechanisms are related to different dimensions of grievance-inducing and, partly, greed-related inequality, which may occur in polygynous societies. These dimensions include (i) economic,...

The research examines wage inequality in the Spanish labour market from a regional perspective, drawing on stochastic dominance techniques. The field of study is of particular interest because wage determination in Spain incorporates an important territorial component, facilitated by certain...

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...

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...

We develop a general equilibrium model of earnings, income and wealth heterogeneity in continuous time. We extend existing analytical and numerical methods to solve the model. We calibrate the model to U.S. data and find that stochastic interest rates provide a mechanism to link earnings, income...