We use a large household panel for Japan (Keio Household Panel Survey) to estimate household-size economies in energy consumption. The household-size economies we obtain are significant and sizable: the per-capita energy-related spending of a two-adult household is only about two-thirds of the...

Raising children demands a considerable amount of parental time, obliging working parents either to reduce their leisure time further or to buy childcare services in the market. Parents may face additional opportunity costs upon deciding to participate in the labor market, but these are...

Die Zusammenlegung von Arbeitslosen- und Sozialhilfe hatte unter anderem das Ziel, die Arbeitsanreize für arbeitsfähige Leistungsempfänger zu stärken. Wie sind die Anreizwirkungen zu bewerten? Wirkt der durch Arbeitslosengeld II erreichbare Lebensstandard negativ bei der Entscheidung für...

In many federations, fiscal equalization schemes soften fiscal imbalances across the member states. Such schemes usually imply that the member states internalize only a small fraction of the additional tax revenue from an expansion of the state-specific tax bases, while the remainder of the...

Die flächendeckende Einführung des gesetzlichen Mindestlohns ist eine bedeutende Intervention in den Arbeitsmarkt und die marktwirtschaftliche Ordnung in Deutschland. Motiviert ist die gesetzliche Änderung vor allem sozialpolitisch: Die Einkommenssituation von Niedrigeinkommensbeziehern soll...

The jackknife is a resampling method that uses subsets of the original database by leaving out one observation at a time from the sample. The paper develops fast algorithms for jackknifing inequality indices with only a few passes through the data. The number of passes is independent of the...

In many federations, fiscal equalization schemes soften fiscal imbalances across the member states. Such schemes usually imply that a member state internalizes only a small fraction of the additional tax revenue from an expansion of the state-specific tax base, while the remainder of the...

Most simulated micro-founded macro models use solely consumer-demand aggregates in order to estimate deep economy-wide preference parameters, which are useful for policy eva- luation. The underlying demand-aggregation properties that this approach requires, should be easy to empirically...

Micro-econometric intra-cohort profitability analyses of pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension contributions are rare. We use representative employment histories of German PAYG pension insurants retiring in year 2005 to examine the determinants of the profitability of contributions using nominal internal...

Education is not financed solely by the taxpayer—many institutions and activities require payment of top-up fees, at the very least. This applies for instance to education and care services for children. A household’s private expenditure on education depends largely on the families’...