One of the major challenges of empirical tax research is the identification and calculation of appropriate tax data. While there is consensus that average marginal tax rates are most suitable for studying the effects of tax policy on economic growth, due to data limitations the calculation of...

This paper makes use of data from the German socio-economic panel to gain new insights into the determinants of unemployment duration in Germany. Due to substantial differences with respect to labour market outcomes we follow a stratified approach with respect to gender and ethnicity. To analyze...

Empirical studies analyzing the determinants of U.S. presidential popularity have delivered quite inconclusive results concerning the role of economic variables by assuming linear relationships. We employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of semi-parametric additive mixed models and...

The paper provides new evidence on the outmigration of foreign-born immigrants. We make use of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and employ penalized spline smoothing in the context of a Poisson-type Generalized Additive Mixed Model (GAMM), which enables us to incorporate bivariate...

The thesis analyzes the changing employment and economic situation of females when they become mothers. Two major questions are focused in the thesis: First, when do mothers return to their previous employment after bearing a child? Secondly, what are the individual economic consequences after...

In this paper we show that findings of an apparently instable popularity function of U.S. presidents, as reported in the previous literature, are likely the consequence of the common use of linear estimation techniques. Employing Penalized Spline Smoothing in the context of Additive Mixed Models...