In this paper, we take a multilevel perspective to investigate the role of child care in the transition to motherhood in Germany. We argue that in the European institutional context the availability of public day care and informal child care arrangements should be a central element of the local...

Why do people work unpaid overtime? We show that remarkable long-term labor earnings gains are associated with unpaid overtime in West Germany. A descriptive analysis suggests that over a 10-year period workers with unpaid overtime experience on average at least a 10 percentage points higher...

Empirical work on price-cost margins often treats costs as exogenous. Allowing for endogenous costs when estimating price-cost margins is the topic of this paper. Methodologically, the endogenous cost model we propose leads to an additional equation that allows for the simultaneity in price...

Many validation studies deal with item-nonresponse and measurement error in earnings data. In this paper we explore motives of respondents for the failure to reveal earnings using the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). GSOEP collects socio-economic information of private households in the...

This study argues that the political considerations were an important factor behind the crisis of the Brazilian real in January 1999. The divided coalition government and a president facing impending elections eschewed the correction of external misalignments and the fiscal austerity at a time...

This paper analyzes the distribution of technical efficiency within manufacturing industries. Using a representative sample of 35,000 firms in 255 industries of the German cost structure census, technical efficiencies are estimated by applying a deterministic frontier production function with...

In the year 2000, the German government passed the most ambitious tax reform in postwar German history aiming at a significant tax relief for households. An important aim of this tax reform was to improve work incentives and, thereby, foster employment. Drawing on data of the German Socio...

Much progress has been made in recent years on developing and applying a direct measure of utility using survey questions on subjective well-being. In this paper we explore whether this new type of measurement can be fruitfully applied to the study of interdependent utility in general, and...

Following Keen and Marchand (1997), the paper analyses the effect of fiscal competition on the composition of public spending in a model where capital and skilled workers are mobile while low skilled workers are immobile. Taxes are levied on capital and labour. Each group of workers benefits...