The flat income tax has become increasingly popular recently, yet its implementation is limited to Eastern Europe. We analyse the distributional and e? ciency effects of flat tax scenarios for Western European countries. Our simulations show that flat tax rates required to attain revenue...

This paper investigates the evolution of wages and the recent tendency to rising wage inequality in Germany, based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) for 1984 to 2004. Between 1984 and 1994 the wage distribution was fairly stable. Wage inequality started to increase around 1994 in...

Our study is based on the traditional Becker-Ehrlich deterrence model, but we analyse the model in the face of currently discussed factors of crime like demographic changes, youth-unemployment and income inequality. We use a panel of the German Laender (states) that allows us to exploit...

We use a stylized model to show that, if transfers to the poor are founded on a security argument, there is a negative trade-off between law enforcement expenditures and criminality. In contrast, if transfers are based on altruism, the correlation between the same variables may appear positive....

This paper evaluates the linkage between social security strategies and redistributive effects in EU social transfer systems. It is argued that the various European systems produce different patterns of redistribution that may be explained by the adoption of different mixes of social security...

This paper presents estimates of the unification bonus for East Germans over the period 1991 to 1998. The unification bonus is defined as the discounted value of the difference between a person?s actual income and his or her counterfactual real income stream forecast for a hypothetical...

This paper analyses the distributive impacts of various regulatory and institutional settings of European schemes of social assistance. For this purpose, two sets of classifications of European schemes of social assistance are introduced that classify the systems according to regulatory...

The paper investigates the evolution of wages and wage inequality in Germany based on samples from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) 1984 to 2005. Real gross hourly wages for prime age dependent male workers increased on average by 23 percent between 1984 and 1994 in West Germany and the...

The paper investigates the evolution of wages and wage inequality in Germany based on samples from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) 1984 to 2005. Real gross hourly wages for prime age dependent male workers increased on average by 23 percent between 1984 and 1994 in West Germany and the...

In this paper, the relationship between the degree of centralisation and the distributive outcomes in European schemes of social assistance is investigated. For this purpose, a scheme of classification suitable for grouping the EU15 schemes except for Luxembourg according to features related to...