The present paper explores the extent to which new joint General Budget Support (GBS) systems have been able to overcome the problems of aid dependency and negative fiscal incentives that can potentially result from high levels of on-budget aid. As approximately 90 percent of new joint GBS goes to sub-Saharan Africa, this analysis, which covers the period from 2000 to 2008, evaluates data from 37 sub-Saharan developing countries. According to fixed effect and system GMM estimations, joint GBS assistance – although highly discretionary – does not undermine recipients’ revenue mobilization efforts. Indeed, on the contrary, while aid in general has no measurable impact on recipients’ revenue performance, joint GBS programs are associated with higher revenue mobilization. This suggests that on-budget aid delivered under well-targeted conditionality successfully mitigates adverse fiscal incentives while substantially enhancing recipients’ fiscal space.

This paper systematically investigates whether different kinds of personality characteristics influence entrepreneurial development. On the basis of a large, representative household panel survey, we examine the extent to which the Big Five traits and further personality characteristics, which are more specifically related to entrepreneurial tasks, influence entry into self- employment and survival of self-employed persons in Germany. The empirical analysis reveals that among the specific characteristics in particular “risk attitudes” and “locus of control” have strong effects on entry and survival. With respect to the Big Five approach, in particular the traits “openness to experience” and “extraversion” and to a lower extent “agreeableness” and “neuroticism” help to explain entrepreneurial development. The explanatory power of the Big Five is comparable to one of the most prominent determinants of entrepreneurship – education – and approximately three times larger than parental selfemployment.

This paper provides formulas for optimal top marginal tax rates when couples are taxed according to income splitting between spouses, consumption is taxed, and the skill distribution is unbounded. Optimal top marginal income tax rates are computed for Germany using a dataset that includes the tax returns of all German top taxpayers. We find that the optimal top marginal tax rate converges to about 2/3 and convergence obtains at income levels that are substantially higher than those currently subject to the actual top tax rate.

In this paper we study the macroeconomic effects of large exchange rate appreciations. Using a sample of 128 countries from 1960-2008, we identify large nominal and real appreciations shocks and study their macroeconomic effects in a dummy-augmented panel autoregressive model. Our results show that an exchange rate appreciation can have strong effects on current account balances. Within three years after the appreciation event, the current account balance on average deteriorates by three percentage points of GDP. This effect occurs through a reduction of savings without a meaningful reduction in investment. Real export growth slows down substantially, while imports remain by and large unaffected. The output costs of appreciation are small and not statistically significant, indicating a shift towards domestic sources of growth. All these effects appear somewhat more pronounced in developing countries.

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political agenda. We use survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and estimate the net wealth distribution at the very top, based on publicly available information about very rich Germans. Since net wealth is strongly concentrated, the capital levy could raise substantial revenue, even if relatively high personal allowances are granted. We also analyze the compliance and administrative costs of the capital levy.

A personal bankruptcy law that allows for a “fresh start” after bankruptcy reduces the individual risk involved in entrepreneurial activity. On the other hand, as risk shifts to creditors who recover less of their credit after a debtor’s bankruptcy, lenders may charge higher interest rates or ration credit supply, which can hamper entrepreneurship. Both aspects of a more forgiving personal bankruptcy law are less relevant for wealthy potential entrepreneurs who still risk losing their wealth, but tend not to face higher interest rates because they provide collateral. This paper illustrates these effects in a model and tests the hypotheses derived by exploiting the introduction of a “fresh start” policy in Germany in 1999 as a natural experiment, based on representative household panel data. The results indicate that the insurance effect of a more forgiving personal bankruptcy law exceeds the interest effect and on balance encourages less wealthy individuals to enter into entrepreneurship.

Welfare states redistribute both between individuals (inter-individual redistribution) reducing annual, cross-sectional inequality and over the lifecycle of an individual (intra-individual redistribution) insuring individuals against income risks in the long-term. But studies measuring redistribution often focus on a one-year period and the second aspect is neglected. To quantify both inter- and intra-individual redistribution in Germany this study uses SOEP data from 1984 to 2009 to construct long-term incomes over a 20-year period. Results show that annual, cross-sectional inequality is higher than inequality in the long-run, but the effect of redistribution is also larger annually than in the long-term. Depending on age the distributional focus of the German welfare state differs. When persons are young, state intervention reduces income differences between individuals mainly through the progressive tax system. Getting older and reaching retirement age income-smoothing redistribution via social security pensions becomes central.

We analyse and compare individual beliefs about the effects of competition and their evolution over time in transition economies and experienced market economies. At the onset of transition, competition beliefs in transition countries are far more positive than in market economies. Over time, this difference has vanishes. Convergence can be attributed to changing believes in transition countries. We argue that overly optimistic competition beliefs in transition countries contributed to the possibility of implementing far reaching pro-market reforms and show that competition beliefs underlay support for economic reform. The empirical analysis is supplemented with a simple learning model rationalizing the findings on competition belief overshooting.

We exploit an exhaustive administrative dataset that includes the individual tax returns of all households in the top percentile of the income distribution in Germany to pin down the effective income taxation of households with very high incomes. Taking tax base erosion into account, we find that the top percentile of the income distribution pays an effective average tax rate of 30.5 percent and contributes more than a quarter of total income tax revenue. Within the top percentile, the effective average tax rate is first increasing and then decreasing with income. Since the 1990s, effective average tax rates for the German super rich have fallen by about a third, with major reductions occurring in the wake of the personal income tax reform of 2001-2005. As a result, the concentration of net incomes at the very top of the distribution has strongly increased in Germany.

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel from 1984-2009, we follow persons from their working life into their retirement years and find that, on average, employed people maintain their life satisfaction upon retirement, while long-term unemployed people report a substantial increase in their life satisfaction when they retire. These results are robust to controlling for changes in other life circumstances and suggest that retiring is associated with a switch in the relevant social norms that causes an increase in identity utility for the formerly unemployed. This is supportive of the idea that, by including identity in the utility function, results from the empirical life satisfaction literature can be reconciled with the economic theory of individual utility.

Incentives to invest in higher education are affected by both the direct wage effect of human capital investments and the indirect wage effect resulting from lower unemployment risks and shorter spells in unemployment associated with higher educated. We analyse the returns to education in Austria, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the United Kingdom, countries which differ significantly regarding both their education systems and labour market structure. We estimate augmented Mincerian wage equations accounting for the effects of unemployment on individual wages using EU-SILC data. Across countries we find a high variation of the effect of education on unemployment duration. Overall, the returns to education are estimated to be the highest in the UK, and the lowest for Sweden. A wage decrease due to time spent in unemployment results in a decline in the hourly wages in Austria, Germany and Italy.

Mergers & acquisitions (M&A;) are most popular external growth strategies. While the number of M&A; has been increasing during the past decades, on average, only the shareholders of target firms gain value during the acquisitions process, while acquirers do not receive abnormal positive returns. This paper analyses the impact of strategically valuable resources on the success of M&A; decisions. We test complementary resource-based hypotheses regarding the value of M&A; for the shareholders of both transaction partners. Our sample consists of transactions in the pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry. The results of our study show that the shareholders of both transaction partners will gain above average positive returns only when the acquirer and the target own and combine strategically valuable resources and capabilities.

This paper considers a market in which only the incumbent’s quality is publicly known. The entrant’s quality is observed by the incumbent and some fraction of informed consumers. This leads to price signalling rivalry between the duopolists, because the incumbent gains and the entrant loses when observed prices make the uninformed consumers more pessimistic about the entrant’s quality. When the uninformed consumers’ beliefs satisfy the ‘intuitive criterion’ and the ‘unprejudiced belief refinement’, only a two–sided separating equilibrium can exist and prices are identical to the full information outcome.

We analyze the compliance costs of individual taxpyers resulting from the German income tax. using survey data that has been raised between December 2008 and April 2009, we find evidence for a considerably higher cost burden of self-employed taxpaxers. Taxable income and the demand for external support are positively correlated with compliance costs, while the time effort of female taxpayers is significantly lower. We also find evidence for a positive correlation of education and tax knowledge with the compliance burden. By contrast, a joint assessment of a married couple seems to reduce the monetized time effort. The aggregated cost burden of German income taxpayers amounts to 6.1-7.2 billion €, respectively 3.2-3.7 % of the income tax revenue in 2007. This estimate is higher than latest projections in a number of other European countries like Spain and Sweden, but significantly lower than results for the United States and Australia.

In diesem Beitrag werden die Beschäftigungswirkungen von Lohnsubventionen und eines Mindestlohnes für Deutschland analysiert. Studien zum Mindestlohn im Baugewerbe und Simulationen zu einem allgemeinen Mindestlohn weisen einhellig auf Beschäftigungsverluste durch einen gesetzlichen Mindestlohn für die Bundesrepublik hin. Die Größenordnung hängt vom Mindestlohnniveau, Gütermarktreaktionen und der Reichweite des Mindestlohnes (Einschluss Auszubildender, geringfügig Beschäftigter) ab. Bei einem Mindestlohn von 7,5 € pro Stunde und elastischer Güternachfrage schätzen wir einen Gesamtverlust von ca. 220.000, insbesondere geringfügig Beschäftigten. Evaluationen bestehender Lohnsubventionen finden nur geringe Arbeitsanreizeffekte. Im Beitrag wird alternativ der aufkommensneutral gestaltete „Beschäftigungsbonus“, der geringe Stundenlöhne und nicht niedrige Erwerbseinkommen subventioniert, betrachtet. Dieser würde ein zusätzliches Arbeitsangebot von ca. 80.000 Personen bzw. ein zusätzliches Stundenangebot von etwa 420.000 Vollzeitäquivalenten induzieren. In Kombination mit einem allgemeinen Mindestlohn wären arbeitnehmerseitige Lohnsubventionen ineffektiv. Die Simulationsergebnisse zeigen, dass in diesem Fall arbeitgeberseitige Lohnsubventionen die infolge des Mindestlohnes gestiegenen Arbeitskosten kompensieren und Beschäftigungsverluste im Niedriglohnbereich teilweise verringern können.

We employ a neoclassical growth model to assess the impact of financial liberalization in a developing country on capital owners` and workers` consumption and welfare. We find in a baseline calibration for an average non- OECD country that capitalists suffer a 42 percent reduction in permanent consumption because capital inflows reduce their return to capital while workers gain 8 percent of permanent con- sumption because capital inflows increase wages. These huge gross impacts contrast with the small positive net effect found in a neoclas- sical represent agent model by Gourinchas and Jeanne (2006). We further show that the result for capitalists is insensitive to enhanced productivity catch-up processes induced by capital inflows. Our find- ings can help explain why poorer countries tend to be less financially open as capitalists` losses are largest for countries with the lowest capital stocks, inducing strong opposition to capital market opening.

After an expansionary monetary policy shock employment increases and unemployment falls. In standard New Keynesian models the fall in aggregate unemployment does not affect employed workers at all. However, Lüchinger, Meier and Stutzer (2010) found that the risk of unemployment negatively affects utility of employed workers: An increases in aggregate unemployment decreases workers' subjective well-being, which can be explained by an increased risk of becoming unemployed. I take account of this effect in an otherwise standard New Keynesian open economy model with unemployment as in Galí (2010) and nd two important results with respect to expansionary monetary policy shocks: First, the usual wealth effect in New Keynesian models of a declining labor force, which is at odds with the data as highlighted by Christiano, Trabandt and Walentin (2010), is shut down. Second, the welfare effects of such shocks improve considerably, modifying the standard results of the open economy literature that set off with Obstfeld and Rogoff's (1995) redux model.

This paper assesses the validity of the perception-based governance indicators used by the US Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) for aid allocation decisions. By conducting Explanatory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis of data from 1996 to 2009, we find that although the MCA purports to measure seven distinct dimensions of governance, only two discrete underlying dimensions, the ‘participatory dimension of governance’ and the ‘overall quality of governance,’ can be identified. Our results also show that some of the doubts that have been raised concerning the validity of perception-based governance indicators are less warranted when the indicators are applied exclusively to developing countries.