Using data from the 1997 and 2002 waves of the German Socio-Economic Panel and from official statistics, I study whether natives are less supportive of state help for the unemployed in regions where the share of foreigners among the unemployed is high. Unlike previous studies, I use...

Adequate housing and affordable warmth are essential human needs, the lack of which may seriously harm people's health. Germany provides an allowance to low-income households, covering the housing as well as the space heating cost, to protect people from the consequences of poor housing...

Welfare states redistribute both between individuals reducing annual inequality and over the life-cycle insuring against income risks. But studies measuring redistribution often focus only on a one-year period. Using German SOEP data from 1984 to 2009, long-term inequality over a 20-year period...

We analyze empirically the optimal design of social insurance and assistance programs when families obtain insurance by making labor supply choices for both spouses. For this purpose, we specify a structural life-cycle model of the labor supply and savings decisions of singles and married...

Using representative micro data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) for the year 2002, we analyse non-take-up behaviour of Social Assistance (SA) inGermany. According to our simulation as much as 67 percent of the eligible population did not claim SA in that year which is slightly...

We present first estimates of rates of non-take-up for social assistance in Germany after the implementation of major social policy reforms in 2005. The analysis is based on a microsimulation model, which includes a detailed description of the German social assistance programme. Our findings...

This paper offers a first empirical investigation of how labor taxation (income and payroll taxes) affects individuals' well-being. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in tax rules over time and across demographic groups using 26 years of German panel data. We find that the tax...

In 2001, the voluntary additional Riester pension scheme was implemented in Germany. Financial subsidies should incentivize people to increase their private pension savings. In this paper, we hypothesize that these publicly subsidized savings mainly replace existing not subsidized savings and...

Deploying data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) we analyze the variability of individual earnings and equivalent household income. Permanent and transitory variances of male income over the period 1984-2008 are estimated for Old German Laender in order to determine their importance to...