Publications of the Research Group Inequality and Public Policy

  1. Refereed Journal // 2018

    Tax refunds and income manipulation: evidence from the EITC

    Welfare programs are important in terms of reducing poverty, although they create incentives for recipients to maximize their income by either reducing their labor supply or manipulating their taxable income. In…

  2. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 18-032 // 2018

    Unemployment Effects of the German Minimum Wage in an Equilibrium Job Search Model

    We structurally estimate an equilibrium search model using German administrative data and use this for counterfactual analyses of a uniform minimum wage. The model with worker and firm heterogeneity does not…

  3. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 18-021 // 2018

    Inequality of Educational Opportunities and the Role of Learning Intensity: Evidence from a Quasi-Experiment in Germany

    Over the 2000s, many federal states in Germany shortened the duration of secondary school by one year while keeping the curriculum unchanged. Exploiting quasi-experimental variation due to the staggered…

  4. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 18-016 // 2018

    Idiosyncratic Risk, Aggregate Risk, and the Welfare Effects of Social Security

    We ask whether a pay-as-you-go financed social security system is welfare improving in an economy with idiosyncratic productivity and aggregate business cycle risk. We show analytically that the whole welfare…

  5. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 18-015 // 2018

    Cognition, Optimism and the Formation of Age-Dependent Survival Beliefs

    This paper investigates the roles psychological biases play in deviations between subjective survival beliefs (SSBs) and objective survival probabilities (OSPs). We model deviations between SSBs and OSPs through…

  6. ZEW Discussion Paper No. 18-014 // 2018

    Optimal Taxes on Capital in the OLG Model with Uninsurable Idiosyncratic Income Risk

    We characterize the optimal linear tax on capital in an Overlapping Generations model with two period lived households facing uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. The Ramsey government internalizes the…

  7. ZEW policy brief No. 18-02 // 2018

    Verteilungswirkungen der Reformpläne der Großen Koalition: Rentner und Familien sind die Hauptprofiteure

    Germany’s stable economic growth of the past years has led to a budget surplus, which the newly-formed Grand Coalition now plans to use, for instance, to reduce the burden on broad levels of the population.…