Households can differ in size and needs. A reliable assessment of inequality in living standards, therefore, necessitates the conversion of the original heterogeneous into an artificial quasi-homogeneous population. Ebert and Moyes (2003) and Shorrocks (2004) theoretically explore the properties...

For a representative sample of German taxpayers, atypical slopes of Engel curves imply fis-cal incomes to be a biased measure of taxpayers’ abilities to consume. Yet, we show that, in general, the dataset provides sufficient information for converting taxpayers’ fiscal incomes into economic,...

Nach der Sommerpause 2010 will die Bundesregierung ihr Energiekonzept vorstellen, das die Leitlinien des künftigen Energiemix definiert. Im Fokus der Diskussion stehen der Ausbau des Anteils erneuerbarer Energieträger an der Stromerzeugung sowie eine Verlängerung der Laufzeiten deutscher...

We use data from the Luxembourg Income Study in order to quantify the economy-wide monetary gains achieved by Household-Size Economies, due to the within-household sharing of goods by individuals living in multi-member households. In most of the twenty countries we examine, we observe a decline...

The Income Reference Period (IRP), the measurement period of income, differs across micro-economic databases of household or individual incomes; typically it is a year, a quarter (of a year) or a month. The length of the IRP affects the shape of the income distribution and derived distributional...

Since 2002 the German government has promoted private retirement saving plans by means of special subsidies and tax incentives: the Riester scheme. This policy mainly targets low-income households. Using data from the German Socio-economic Panel, we scrutinize the impact of the Riester scheme on...

In this article, we simulate the concentration process within the German dairy sector employing a sector?wide optimization model. As a result, we get cost minimizing structures of the dairy sector for various time horizons depending on varying levels of transportation costs. We show that the...

With its commitment to double the share of renewables in electricity generation to at least 30% by 2020, the German government has embarked on a costly policy course whose public support remains an open empirical question. Building on ample household survey data, we trace peoples'...

Raising children demands a considerable amount of parental time, obliging working parents either to reduce their leisure time further or to buy childcare services in the market. Parents may face additional opportunity costs upon deciding to participate in the labor market, but these are...