Using representative data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), this paper finds a statistically significant union wage premium in Germany of almost three percent which is not simply a collective bargaining premium. Given that the union membership fee is typically about one percent of...

What is the role of financial deregulation on rising finance wage premium in the US? This study makes use of the Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act of 1994 as an exogenous shift to local banking markets and investigates the effect of deregulation induced competition on relative...

We investigate whether public provision of positional goods can be a sensible instrument to address inefficiencies arising from relative-standing externalities associated with the excessive consumption of such goods. In situations where consumers face a discrete choice between a private and a...

Exploiting the German 2008 tax reform we employ an event study design to assess the effects of local corporate taxes on stock prices. We match firms to the local tax rates at their respective headquarters and analyze the differential stock market responses to the reform decision. We find that...

Business-cycle adjustment is mostly determined via filter methods, especially the HP filter, or, e.g. within the EU fiscal rules, by a production function approach. James Hamilton put big doubt on the quality of the HP filter estimates, and proposed an alternative regression approach to...

Previous literature has identified income, poor health and social relationships as the most important predictors of subjective well-being (SWB). In addition, the literature has identified a non-linear relationship between age and SWB, with a dip in SWB in mid-life. Explanations of the non-linear...