Child-care subsidies are meant to facilitate work for mothers with small children. The paper demonstrates that the predominant current subsidy scheme in Switzerland, which ties the subsidies to realized income (but not to potential income), creates strongly negative work incentives especially...

Early retirement is predominantly considered to be the result of incentives set by social security and the tax system. But the Swiss example demonstrates that the incidence of early retirement has dramatically increased even in the absence of institutional changes. We argue that an actuarially...

There is an ongoing discussion in Germany about the implementation of tax credits in order to reintegrate low-skilled workers into the labor market. This paper aims at analyzing the policy instrument of tax credits in a theoretical model that systematically compares its costs and benefits in the...

This paper presents new evidence on how the annuitization decision is affected by changes in the annuity’s value. We take advantage of an unprecedented change in policy in a number of Swiss occupational pension plans: The 20 percent reduction in the rate at which retirement capital is...

We propose a difference-in-differences strategy to identify the existence of interjurisdictional tax competition, and to estimate its spatial reach. Our strategy rests on differences between desired tax levels, determined by culture-specific preferences, and equilibrium tax levels, determined by...

We analyze the effectiveness of further training for unemployed under two different regulatory regimes, which are featured by different assignment mechanisms and selection criteria. The first regime is characterized by a strong influence of caseworkers, because they can assign unemployed to...

In this study, we promote the estimation of alternative distributional policy parameters that identify horizontal changes in conditional distributions at quantiles from a reference distribution. The motivation underlying the introduction of these new parameters is the comparison of...

This paper discusses identification based on difference-in-differences (DiD) approaches with multiple treatments. It shows that an appropriate adaptation of the common trend assumption underlying the DiD strategy for the comparison of two treatments restricts the possibility of effect...

This paper develops a nonparametric methodology for treatment evaluation with multiple outcome periods under treatment endogeneity and missing outcomes. We use instrumental variables, pre-treatment characteristics, and short-term (or intermediate) outcomes to identify the average treatment...

We estimate the effects of active labour market policies (ALMP) on subsequent employment by nonparametric instrumental variables and matching estimators. Very informative administrative Swiss data with detailed regional information are combined with exogenous regional variation in programme...