During the next decades the populations of most developed countries will grow older as a result of the low level of birth rates since the 1970s and/or the continuously increasing life expectancy. We show within a Generational Accounting framework how unsustainable the public finances of France,...

This paper provides a comparison of tax morale between inhabitants of East and West Germany in its post-reunification period, using three World Values Survey/European Values Survey waves between 1990 and 1999. German reunification is particularly interesting for the analysis of tax morale as it...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

We study the labor market outcomes of a deregulation reform in Germany that removed licensing requirements to become self-employed in some occupations. Using longitudinal social security data, we implement a matched difference-in-differences design with entropy balancing to account for...

Despite massive digitization efforts, the German economy has experienced a marked slowdown in its productivity growth. This paper analyzes the reasons behind this disconcerting development. A major factor is the turnaround of the labor market that commenced around 2005. The successful...