Contributions published at Department of Economics (Florian Scheuer)

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We consider a regulator's choice between environmentally motivated emissions taxes and output taxes. We investigate how the optimal instrument depends on the monitoring cost function, the firm's technology, and on social preferences regarding output and environmental quality. Pure emissions taxes are usually not optimal with monitoring costs. Pure output taxes are optimal under sufficiently high monitoring costs, sufficiently limited options for emission reduction by means other than output reduction, and sufficiently high substitutability of the output. Finally, conditions for the optimality of mixed taxes are given.

This paper proposes the following incentive scheme for the private provision of public goods: government should reward and penalize deviations from the mean contribution by an appropriate factor. This makes efficient contribution individually rational even if individuals see through the government budget constraint.

The growing demand for long-term care (LTC) causes the relationship between children and their parents to gain increased importance for society. Parents may create incentives for children to provide LTC through bequests, or they may purchase LTC insurance. While these instruments have been analyzed separately in the literature, this article shows that optimal LTC insurance must be small in the presence of bequests. Thus, the failure of private LTC insurance to diffuse into middle-class households may be explained by the fact that the bequest instrument is fully available to the current generation of parents, who for the first time since 1914 are in a position to bequeath an intact stock of capital in major industrialized countries.

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on native wage impacts of immigration. I propose a mobile-fixed factor distinction as a framework in which to think about the differential impact of immigration on various labor market groups. Skilled workers are treated as a fixed factor of production since the strong reliance on skill certification in Germany inhibits mobility and shelters from competition. Unskilled workers, in contrast, receive competitive wages. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1984–1989 I estimate panel wage regressions for groups of workers separated by skill certification. I find that university graduates‘ wages increase, and the wages of workers without postsecondary degree decrease, as the industry share of unskilled workers increases. The effect for apprentices is ambiguous.

A new approach for modeling under-reported Poisson counts is developed. The parameters of the model are estimated by Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation. An application to workers absenteeism data from the German Socio-Economic Panel illustrates the fruitfulness of the approach. Worker absenteeism and the level of pay are unrelated, but absence rates increase with firm size.

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1984-90, the author analyzes the entrance of young individuals into the German labor market, comparing the experience of apprenticeship graduates to that of graduates from universities, full-time vocational schools, and secondary schools. Apprentices experienced fewer unemployment spells in the transition to their first full-time employment than did non-apprentices. Among apprentices, those trained in large firms had the smoothest transition to employment; once employed, however, apprentices (whether they stayed in their training firm or not) and non-apprentices had similar job stability (as measured by tenure). An estimated 70% of apprenticeship trainees left their training firm within a five-year period. These findings are consistent with the view that apprenticeship training develops general, portable skills rather than firm-specific skills

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Innerhalb der Kontrakttheorie hat sich im vergangenen Jahrzehnt die Theorie unvollständiger Verträge als besonders fruchtbar erwiesen. Jüngste Forschungsarbeiten zeigen jedoch, daß die durch Hart und Moore (1988) als gegeben geglaubte Fundierung nicht sehr robust ist. Ziel des Artikels ist es, einen Einblick in aktuelle Fragen und Ergebnisse der diesbezüglichen Forschung zu ermöglichen.

The retirement decisions of spouses may be interdependent for various reasons: similarity of tastes, joint assets, sharing rules for income and housework, or complementarity of leisure. Because of data limitations, only a few empirical studies exist on this topic. From a policy point of view interdependent retirement could become important if legislators in different EC countries are forced to synchronize minimum retirement ages, which are lower now for females than males in a number of countries. In the theoretical part, the reaction of spouses to changes in the retirement age of their partners is analysed for typical family patterns. In the empirical part, the possibility of interdependent retirement is studied for Austrian data. The findings show an asymmetry: husbands react to changes in wives' legal minimum retirement age, wives don't react vice versa. The cross effect on men's participation rates -- resulting from a rise in women's minimum retirement age --is almost half as big as the first-round effect upon the women themselves.

Because of the public good character of global emissions it is difficult to implement reduction targets as formulated at Toronto or Rio. This paper presents a simple mechanism for inducing efficient contributions to the reductions of emissions as a non-cooperative equilibrium. The world is partitioned into groups of countries, and then each country is taxed or subsidised according to its relative performance in the group. We estimate abatement cost- and benefit functions for 135 countries and simulate the mechanism for different groupings of countries. The simulations show that the involved global budget is the smaller the finer the partition and the more equal the countries within a group. Moreover, with such a partition most countries profit from the mechanism so that broad political support may be expected. If groups are composed of unequal countries, then the mechanism leads to a more egalitarian distribution of world income and welfare.

This paper employs ICP expenditure data to investigate the relationship between income and product diversity. It turns out that per-capita income has a strong positive impact on the number of products consumed at a non-negligible level in a country, and a significant negative impact on the concentration of consumers' expenditure across different goods categories. Inequality in the size distribution of incomes has a significant positive impact on the number of consumed goods, but no clear effect on the concentration of expenditure.

This study shows that in general the impact of equity on tax evasion depends on how the taxpayer's risk aversion is affected by perceived equity. Then possible reasons are discussed why an increase in perceived equity may increase a person's risk aversion and thus lead to a decrease of evasion. An economic as well as a psychological argument are presented which can explain a positive relationship between risk aversion and equity, and thus, between evasion and inequity. The economic argument considers cases where the valuation of public output increases with income. The psychological argument is based on the hypothesis that people find evasion more blameworthy in a system which is considered to be just than in an unfair system. With such a norm an increase in equity increases the bad reputation or bad conscience of evaders and leads to a reduction of evasion.