We study the effects of a large car scrappage scheme in Germany on new car purchases and local air quality by combining vehicle registration data with data on local air pollutant emissions. For identification we exploit cross-sectional variation across districts in the number of cars eligible...

This paper explores if more generous social spending polices in fact lead to less income inequality, or if redistributive outcomes are offset by behavioral disincentive effects. To account for the inherent endogeneity of social policies with regard to inequality levels, I apply the System GMM...

How do different components of the tax and transfer systems affect disposable income inequality? This paper explores the redistributive effects of different tax benefit instruments in the enlarged EU based on two approaches. Inequality analysis based on the standard approach suggests that...

This paper presents an evaluation of the tax-transfer treatment of married couples in 15 EU countries using the EUROMOD microsimulation model. First, we show that many tax-transfer schemes in Europe feature negative jointness defined as a situation where the tax rate on one person depends...

This paper estimates the welfare and distributional impact of two types of welfare reform in the 15 (pre-enlargement) member countries of the European Union. The reforms are revenue neutral and financed by an overall and uniform increase in marginal tax rates on earnings. The first reform...

We investigate whether and how economic integration increases state capacity. This important relationship has not been studied in detail so far. We put together a conceptual framework to guide our analysis that highlights what we call the Montesquieu, Weber and Smith channels. Each of these...

This paper provides a demographic outlook of the Euro-Mediterranean region and then shows the economic and fiscal consequences of such demographic differences within a two-region model with international labor mobility. International labor mobility is also examined through an externalities...

The increased concerns about climate change have made renewable energy sources an important topic of research. Several scholars have applied different methodologies to examine the relationships between energy consumption and economic growth of individual and groups of countries and to analyze...

To assess the efficacy of Covid-19 non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on infectious disease containment in Europe, we first use weekly 2015-20 data on the spread of influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) to compare the 2019-20 season of these diseases with the previous five....

We analyze different alternatives how a common unemployment insurance system for the euro area (EA) could be designed and assess their effectiveness to act as an insurance device in the presence of asymmetric macroeconomic shocks. Running counterfactual simulations based on micro data for the...