type="main" xml:id="rssa12079-abs-0001" <title type="main">Summary</title> <p>Empirical studies have shown plasticity of personality traits until early adulthood. The extent to which schooling is a crucial determinant in this context has not yet been analysed coherently. Although they have left the curriculum largely...</p>

This study investigates the consequences of revenue-neutral tax reforms on the members of two-person households. The model employed has individual utility functions for household members and allows for household production. General conditions are derived specifying when such tax reforms are...

Due to falling fertility and rising life expectancies, a serious financial crisis is looming over the pay-as-you-go pension systems established in many developed countries. The present study demonstrates that falling fertility can partly be explained by the fiscal externalities arising from the...

Recent R&D growth models without strong scale effects imply that long-run growth rates depend only on parameters that are usually taken to be exogenous. However, integrating human capital accumulation into models of this type, Arnold (2002) demonstrates that subsidizing education accelerates...

Previous empirical studies of job creation schemes (JCS) in Germany have shown that the average effects for the participating individuals are negative. However, we find that this is not true for all strata of the population. Identifying individual characteristics that are responsible for the...

The undersupply of spots in German daycare facilities for toddlers challenges parents' possibilities to work. To ease the situation, the government has initiated a new law according to which every child between one and three years of age is entitled to daycare supervision for about four to five...

An important education reform in Germany reduced the duration of university preparatory schooling from 13 to 12 years, but left the curriculum unchanged. In the state of Saxony-Anhalt the reform was completed in 2007 with a double cohort of graduates, providing a natural experiment. We use...