Social values shape policy outcomes. We examine the role of postmaterialism, a widely used concept in the social sciences, for the mix of capital and labour taxation chosen by a society. Following political scientist Inglehart, we define the degree of postmaterialism as the relative importance...

We augment a standard tax model by concerns about tax equity: people get upset when labour is taxed more heavily than capital. Even the slightest concern for tax equity invalidates the common recommendation for small open economies that capital should remain tax-exempt. This holds for exogenous...

Governments often provide their citizens with goods and services that are also supplied in markets: education, housing, nutritional assistance, etc. We analyze the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social image. We show that image...

Governments often provide their citizens with goods and services that are also supplied in markets: education, housing, nutritional assistance, etc. We analyze the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social image. We show that image...

We argue that societies with a stronger tendency towards postmaterialist life goals tilt the tax structure towards personal income taxes and away from corporate taxation. We provide empirical evidence for this correlation in OECD countries. To address endogeneity issues we then use an...

Governments often provide their citizens with goods and services that are also supplied in markets: education, housing, nutritional assistance, etc. We analyze the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social image. We show that image...

Sin taxes have become a widely suggested policy instrument to discourage the consumption of goods deemed harmful to individuals and society. Using surveys and experiments on a representative sample of the US population, we provide evidence on how individuals think and reason about such...

Im Zuge des fortschreitenden demografischen Wandels werden vermehrt die Rolle und die Bedeutung älterer Menschen für die gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Entwicklung diskutiert. Die vorliegende Studie untersucht Innovationen durch und für Ältere als einen spezifischen und wichtigen...

Regional and sector-specific skill shortages are either foreseeable or a reality in Germany. It is unclear whether shortages of skilled workers are more apparent in industry-specific agglomerations due to competitive labor poaching or less apparent benefitting labor pooling. This paper analyses...

Recent proposals for a still missing European deposit insurance scheme (EDIS) argue in favor of a reinsurance framework. In this paper, we use a regime-switching open-economy DSGE model with bank default to assess the relative efficiency of such a scheme. We find that reinsurance by EDIS is more...