We assess the relevance of formal education for the productivity of the self- employed and distinguish between opportunity entrepreneurs, who voluntarily pursue a business opportunity, and necessity entrepreneurs, who lack alternative employment options. We expect differences in the returns to education between these groups because of different levels of control. We use the German Socio-economic Panel and account for the endogeneity of education and non-random selection. The results indicate that the returns to a year of education for opportunity entrepreneurs are 3.5 percentage points higher than the paid employees’ rate of 8.1%, but 6.5 percentage points lower for necessity entrepreneurs.

Generous income support programs as provided by European welfare states have often been blamed to reduce work incentives for lower income classes and to increase durations of unemployment. Standard studies measure work incentives based on annual income concepts. This paper analyzes how work incentives inherent in the German tax-benefit system evolve when extending the time horizon to three years (long-term). Participation tax rates are computed for 3-year periods 1995-1997 and 2005-2007 to reveal potential effects of the labor market reforms between 2003 and 2005. Results show that long-term work incentives increased even more than short-term work incentives. Particularly for middle-income individuals, this is largely explained by the abolition of earnings-related unemployment assistance.

The assumption that remittances are a substitute for credit has been an implicit or explicit theoretical foundation of many empirical studies on remittances. This paper directly tests this assumption by comparing the response to health-related shocks among national and transnational households using panel data from Mexico for 2002 and 2005. While the occurrence of serious health shocks that required hospital treatment doubled the average debt burden of exposed households compared to the control group, households with nuclear family members (a parent, child, or spouse) in the US did not increase their debts due to health shocks. This finding is consistent with the view that remittances respond to households’ demand for financing emergencies and make them less reliant on debt-financing.

Why do people engage in entrepreneurship and commit large parts of their personal wealth to their business, despite comparably low returns and high risk? This paper connects several streams of literature to shed some light on this puzzle and suggests possible future research avenues. Key insights from the literature are that entrepreneurs may operate in imperfect financial markets and that entrepreneurs are less risk-averse than the rest of the population. A focus of this paper is, therefore, on the role of heterogeneous risk attitudes in entrepreneurial decisions, specifically portfolio choice and the entry and exit decisions. Nonpecuniary benefits of entrepreneurship, such as being independent in the workplace, also contribute to an explanation of entrepreneurial behavior.

Gender, income, education and self-employment are robust predictors for individual support for redistribution in the OECD. In addition, considerations of social status, the fairness of the allocation mechanism, perceived moral worth of the poor and individual autonomy are important. The results for the OECD are compared to those for a large sample of non-OECD countries which also include less developed economies. Neither gender, nor self-employment, nor fairness considerations exhibit a robust association with preferences for redistribution. However, education, income, individual autonomy and moral worth of the poor remain important determinants. On average, preferences for redistribution indicate that within the OECD, there is no desire to change redistributive policies. In contrast, in the sample of non-OECD countries, on average there is a desire to redistribute less.

We analyze the distributive justice of the combined burden of income taxes, social security taxes and public transfers on employee households in the United States on the federal level and in six member states. To investigate whether the treatment of families by the aggregate tax and transfer system can be regarded as “fair”, we compare the equivalent incomes of eight different household types. Using the concepts of horizontal equity and system-inherent equivalence scales, we find evidence for a privileged treatment of families with children and a low market income due to the earned income tax credit (EIC), the child tax credit and the supplemental nutrition assistance program (SNAP). If employment taxes are interpreted as taxes in the proper sense, we obtain a favorable treatment of family households and especially married couples for middle-sized market incomes. For high market incomes, we observe a decreasing privilege for all family types. Regarding state tax and transfer systems, temporary aid for needy families (TANF) substantially increases the observed privilege for low-income families compared to singles, while the analyzed state income taxes are generally in line with the federal tax scheme. Overall, our results imply a significant contradiction in value judgments within the U.S. tax and transfer system.

The finding that industrial sectors differ in their dependence on external finance for sector-specific technological reasons and, thus, rely to a different degree on financial development has become a major concept in studies conducted on both growth and trade. Although natural resources might play an important role in each of these fields, research on industries' financial dependence has been limited so far to manufacturing. By focusing on the natural resource sectors, the present paper aims to close this gap in its analysis. It rejects the common view that the natural resource industry in particular is less dependent on the financial system, and finds that the results of the analysis depend on the specific measure being applied. Measures relating investment and cash flow indicate high external dependence, while measures accounting for more short-term liquidity needs demonstrate rather low external dependence of natural resource firms. These results do not change considerably over time or across countries.

This paper provides new empirical insights on the elasticity of taxable income to the net-oftax rate. Using a panel of German income tax return data, we followed taxpayers from 2001 to 2006 to analyze the effects of the German tax reforms of 2004 and 2005. Implementing a dynamic model as proposed by Holmlund and Söderström (2011), we are able to disentangle short-term and long-term responsiveness. These estimates allow us to distinguish between different dimensions of behavioral changes: short-term income reactions in contrast to ‘real’ changes in (reporting) behavior. We compare our results with recent German estimates from the established approach by Gruber and Saez (2002) applied by Gottfried and Witzcak (2009). Following Chetty`s (2009) theoretical considerations, we use multiple (tax code related) income concepts and alternative sample choices. We provide several robustness and validity analyses of the most common income concept, i.e. taxable income excluding capital. Our preferred specification yields (very) high short-term yet small long-term elasticites. The latter range from 0 to 0.16, implying none or only modest persistent behavioral changes to marginal tax rate cuts.

Tax competition for the mobile factor capital has led to a trend in many countries to levy lower taxes on interest income, often introducing differential taxation between interest and business income. In this study, we analyze the effect of such differential taxation on the debt ratio of firms. We exploit a 2009 tax reform in Germany as a quasi-experiment, which introduced a flat final withholding tax and opened a gap of 18 percentage points between the tax rate on income from unincorporated businesses and the new lower tax rate on interest income. We apply a regression adjusted semi- parametric difference-in-difference matching strategy based on firm level panel data. In addition, we implement a more structural approach with a tax rate differential, taking into account its endogeneity by using instrumental variables. The results indicate that firms increase their leverage when the tax rate on interest income decreases, albeit to a small degree.

This paper tracks the development of sectoral saving and borrowing in the US economy over the past 50 years. We show that the financial imbalances that erupted in the financial crisis of 2008 were long in the making and preceded the emergence of global imbalances in the 2000s. The record low household savings rate in the past decade was the product of two separate trends: a sharp fall in the asset acquisition of American households in the 1990s, and an explosion of mortgage borrowing in the 2000s. We present novel disaggregated estimates of the wealth effect on savings. We show that households reduce active savings in response to gains in financial wealth and increase borrowing with rising housing wealth. Finally, we argue that the American credit boom of the 2000s had few direct links to reserve accumulation in emerging markets. The mortgage boom was financed by the US financial sector which intermediated foreign funds from private sources.

In policy discussions, it has frequently been claimed that migrants’ remittances could function as a ‘catalyst’ for financial access among receiving households. This paper provides empirical evidence on this hypothesis from Mexico, a major receiver of remittances worldwide. Using the Mexican Family Life Survey panel (MxFLS) for 2002 and 2005, the results from the fixed effects logit model show that receiving remittances is strongly correlated with the ownership of savings accounts and, to some degree, with the availability of borrowing options. These effects are more important for rural households than for urban households and are more important for microfinance institutions, than for traditional banks.

The costs of wars have been the main driver of public debt in the Western World during the modern era. The late twentieth century stands out as a period that saw a pronounced increase of government debt to GDP ratios in peacetime. This paper assesses the role that financial crises have played in shaping the public debt trajectory in the twentieth century. Focusing on the experiences of 14 industrial economies, I show that financial crises have long and lasting effects on public finances. I provide evidence that the costs of financial crises have increased strongly in the second half of the twentieth century and that the costs of financial crises grow with the size of the financial sector. In many countries, the rising costs incurred from stabilizing the economy after financial crises were an important cause of the peacetime surge of public debt ratios in the late twentieth century. In today's highly financialized economies, financial crises have become a key risk for public finances.

This work offers new insights into the determinants of service offshoring across countries and across service industries. Combining different data sources over the 2006-2009 period, I find that certain country characteristics affect offshoring costs for all services, while the effects of other characteristics depend on the coordination requirements of the respective service industry. The results from a zero-inflated Poisson pseudomaximum likelihood estimation indicate that the effects of a membership in NAFTA, and a common colonial past on service offshoring patterns depend on the task content of the services. These results are robust to the control for unobservable country-level heterogeneity. The quality of legal institutions, a common legal origin, geographic distance, and time zone differences influence offshoring patterns identically across all service industries.

Zu den Verpflichtungen der Mitglieder im Europäischen Fiskalpakt gehört unter anderem, eine nationale Schuldenbremse einzuführen – eine Regel zur Begrenzung der jährlichen Neuverschuldung. Deutschland ist diesen Schritt bereits gegangen. Im vorliegenden Beitrag überprüfen wir, inwieweit das deutsche Modell als Vorbild für andere Staaten des Euroraums taugt. Wir hinterfragen dazu, ob es Regierungen und Parlamente im Aufnehmen von Schulden wirksam einschränkt. Besondere Aufmerksamkeit schenken wir dem Verfahren zur Konjunkturbereinigung. Auf Grundlage eigener Ex-Post-Simulationen kommen wir zu dem Ergebnis, dass es Regierungen und Parlamenten erhebliche Verschuldungsspielräume einräumt, die dem Ziel einer Schuldengrenze zuwiderlaufen. Ähnliche Zweifel an der Zielgenauigkeit der im deutschen Modell gefundenen Regelungen begründen wir im Hinblick auf die Bereinigung um finanzielle Transaktionen, Ausnahmen in Notsituationen und den Stabilitätsrat. Wir gehen ferner darauf ein, wie Staaten das Modell im Sinne eines (noch) wirksameren Mechanismus weiterentwickeln könnten.

Adaptation is omnipresent but people systematically fail to correctly anticipate the degree to which they adapt. This leads individuals to make inefficient intertemporal decisions. This paper concerns optimal income taxation to correct for such anticipation-biases in a framework where consumers adapt to earlier consumption levels through a habit-formation process. The analysis is based on a general equilibrium OLG model with endogenous labor supply and savings where each consumer lives for three periods. Our results show how a paternalistic government may correct for the effects of anticipation-bias through a combination of time-variant marginal labor income taxes and savings subsidies. Furthermore, the optimal policy mix remains the same, irrespective of whether consumers commit to their original life-time plan for work hours and savings decided upon in the first period of life or re-optimize later on when realizing the failure to adapt.

The current global financial “non-system” is marked by instability. In the absence of global solutions, a series of regional arrangements of monetary cooperation have been emerging to cope with such instability. The paper focuses on regional payment systems as an initial step of regional monetary cooperation. In order to evaluate their potential contribution to increase macroeconomic stability of the member countries, we develop a typology of payments systems and systematically compare historic and present initiatives in Europe, Asia and Latin America with reference to the original Keynes Plan. We show that regional payment systems entail beneficial effects by reducing transaction costs of intraregional trade, and by creating incentives for further macroeconomic cooperation. Their contribution to macroeconomic stabilization however depends on the specific design of the respective regional arrangement.

We apply a monopoly trade union model and analyze employment, wage and budgetary effects of (i) an inflow of migrant workers and (ii) an increase in the labor market participation rate of migrants. Per assumption, natives and migrants solely differ with respect to the level of benefit claims in a two- tier welfare system. Furthermore, the labor effects are studied under two types of union behavior. Analyzing the ceteris paribus labor market effects, we identify hidden costs and benefits of intensified integration that emerge from the design of the welfare program. We support previous findings in case of an inflow of migrant workers. More interesting, though, it is shown that a larger share of migrants in the workforce increases (decreases) the employment level, if the union represents (does not represent) migrant workers.

This paper studies Anglo-Dutch premium auctions used in the secondary market for financial securities in eighteenth-century Amsterdam, Europe's financial capital at the time. An Anglo-Dutch premium auction consists of an English auction followed by a Dutch auction, with a cash premium paid to the winner of the first round regardless of the second-round outcome. To rationalize the introduction and continued use of this auction format, we need to determine whether bidding behavior was consistent with equilibrium play. We model this auction format theoretically, and show that the likelihood of a bid in the second round should be higher when there is greater uncertainty about the value of the security being sold. We then test this prediction on data from 16,854 securities sold at auction on 469 days over an 18-year period in the late 1700s; using several different proxies for the uncertainty of a given security's value, we find support for this theoretical prediction.

Institutions matter greatly in the development of competitive advantage. Different institutional strategies to manipulate and shape institutions are discussed in the literature. This paper aims at extending the existing conceptual model of membership strategy. Despite being referenced frequently, the concept of membership strategy is not well developed. This is surprising because what is referred to as membership strategy has become very popular in various industries. We propose and develop a theoretical model that explains a firm’s opportunity to protect itself against dominant institutional pressures and, additionally, to create competitive advantage by implementing a consumer centric membership strategy. Practical examples are discussed to clarify theoretical interrelationships. The main illustrative case focuses on Blizzard Entertainment, an American developer and publisher of video games.

The life-cycle hypothesis implies that consumption would not decline at retirement. However, several studies found relevant declines in food consumption after retirement for the United States. Others concluded that this contradiction of the life-cycle hypothesis is solved by allowing for broader measures of consumption than food. Using repeated crosssection data for Germany, this paper analyzes the retirement consumption puzzle for the German case. For our broadest consumption measure, which includes the flow of durables’ consumption, we find, on average, no significant consumption decline at retirement. This also holds if the potential endogeneity of indidual retirement is controlled for in instrumental variable regressions. We also find heterogeneity in retirement effects among birth cohorts, the level of household wealth, and the level of consumption, but these effects do not support the hypothesis that retirement is associated with a strong reduction of consumption among poorer households.