Single parents and unmarried couples are increasingly replacing the traditional nuclear family. This paper investigates if the greater variety in living arrangements contributes to increased resource disparities among children in Germany. Children in single parent families are disadvantaged in...

Using harmonized household survey data, we analyse long run social mobility in the US, the UK, and Germany and test recent theories of multigenerational persistence of socio-economic status. In this country comparison setting we find evidence against Gregory Clark's "universal law of social...

Im deutschen Einkommensteuersystem wird Ersparnisbildung in Kapitallebensversicherungen durch die Absetzbarkeit der Versicherungsprämien bei der Ermittlung des zu versteuernden Einkommens und durch die Steuerfreiheit der Endausschüttung begünstigt. Die daraus resultierende Steuerersparnis ist...

During the last years more and more discussions came up about the contribution of technology-oriented and technology-intensive industries for the economic development and employment. The estimates of the determinants of the regional number of firm formations point out differences between the...

Many studies of producer behavior consider cost and input demand functions de-rived from microeconomic theory and estimate them on the basis of aggregate data. If firms' characteristics differs, the neglect heterogeneity can lead to estimation bias. An alternative is to restrict individual...

The development of the West German earnings distribution in the 1980's is analysed on the basis of both the German Socio-Economic Panel and micro-data from the Employment Register of the Federal Labour Office. We find that earnings inequality in Germany has increased very little in the 1980's,...

A trend towards softer regulation, especially in the form of negotiated environmental agreements, is observable in national and international environmental policies. Such agreements are controversial, because there are fears that government will relinquish its responsibility for environmental...