Very little is known about the efficient collection of fines despite their indispensable contribution to local government budgets. This paper fills an important gap in the literature by studying the effectiveness of deterrence (enforcement) and non-deterrence (social norms) letters that aim to...

Tax noncompliance harms both social cohesion and public welfare. In the US alone, tax underpayment averaged $39 billion per year from 2008 to 2010. How can tax authorities collect outstanding payments more efficiently? Novel research by RWI in cooperation with the Australian National University...

This paper uses detailed information about household supermarket purchases from the Australian Nielsen Homescan Survey to estimate price elasticities of demand for a range of food categories. An instrumental variable strategy is employed to address endogeneity issues. The estimates obtained from...

This paper uses detailed information about household supermarket purchases from the Australian Nielsen Homescan Survey to estimate price elasticities of demand for a range of food categories. An instrumental variable strategy is employed to address endogeneity issues. The estimates obtained from...

This paper studies the financial capacity of German university graduates to repay their student loans. We find that conventional mortgage-type loans are associated with very high repayment burdens, which make it difficult for German university graduates to repay a debt of more than €10,000. We...

This paper studies the importance of dynamic earnings modeling for the design of income contingent student loans (ICLs). ICLs have been shown to be theoretically optimal in terms of efficiency in the presence of risk aversion, adverse selection and moral hazard, and have attractive equity...

Very little is known about the efficient collection of fines despite their indispensable contribution to local government budgets. This paper fills an important gap in the literature by studying the effectiveness of deterrence (enforcement) and non-deterrence (social norms) letters that aim to...

This paper aims at providing empirical evidence on social exclusion of immigrants in Germany. We demonstrate that when using a conventional definition of the social inclusion index typically applied in the literature, immigrants appear to experience a significant degree of social deprivation and...

This paper investigates the determinants of migrants' financial transfers to their home country using German data. A double-hurdle model is applied to analyze the determinants of the propensity to send transfers abroad and the amount of transfers. The findings reveal that return intentions...