The Male-Female Gap in Physician Earnings: Evidence from a Public Health Insurance System

Empirical evidence from U.S. studies suggests that, on average, female physicians earn less than their male counterparts. This gap in earnings does not disappear when individual and market characteristics are con- trolled for. This paper investigates whether a gender earnings difference can also be observed in a health care system predominantly financed by public insurance companies. Using a unique data set of physicians' earn- ings recorded by a public social security agency in an Austrian province between 2000 and 2004, we find a gender gap in average earnings of about 32 percent. A substantial share of this gap (20 to 47 percent) cannot be explained by individual and market characteristics, leaving labor market discrimination as one possible explanation for the observed gender earn- ings difference of physicians.Health care financing; physician earnings; wage composition

Saving Taxes Through Foreign Plant Ownership

This paper analyzes to which extent foreign plant ownership involves lower tax payments than domestic plant ownership. We employ a model of endogenous foreign subsidiary ownership to derive a set of empirically testable hypotheses about the differential taxation of foreign- and domestically-owned subsidiaries. We assess these hypotheses in a data- set of 33,577 European foreign- and domestically-owned manufacturing plants. We identify a significant tax-saving of endogenous foreign owner- ship. On average, foreign owners pay 594 Euros per employee or about 56 percent less than domestic owners of similar subsidiaries. This effect is larger in thinner markets with fewer plants, in markets with a greater relative presence of foreign owners, and for foreign owners of larger plants.company taxation, multinational firms, propensity score matching

Distance Matters - Evidence from Professional Team Sports

This paper assesses the role of distance in professional team sports, taking the example of football (soccer). We argue that a team’s performance in terms of scored and conceded goals decreases with the distance to the foreign playing venue. To test this hypothesis empirically, we investigate 6,389 away games from the German Football Premier League (’Erste Deutsche Bundesliga’) between the playing seasons 1986-87 and 2006-07. We find that distance contributes significantly in explaining a guest team’s propensity to concede goals, but not so for scoring goals. Focusing on the difference between scored and conceded goals (‘goal difference’) as a measure of the overall success of a football team, we observe a significant and non-monotonic impact of distance on team performance.Professional team performance, distance, event count data, poisson regression model

Incorporation and Taxation: Theory and Firm-level Evidence

This paper provides a theory and firm-level evidence on the incorporation decision of entrepreneurs in a model of taxes and corporate governance. The theory explains how the incorporation decision of entrepreneurs is driven by taxation (corporate and personal income taxes), corporate transparency, access to external capital and limited liability. We estimate features of this model using a large cross-section of more than 540, 000 firms in European manufacturing. We find that higher personal income tax rates favor incorporation while higher corporate tax rates reduce the probability to incorporate. These findings are robust to the inclusion of other economic and institutional determinants of external financing and choice of organizational form.incorporation, governance, taxes, discrete choice models

Capital Structure, Corporate Taxation and Firm Age

This paper analyzes the relationship between capital structure, corporate taxation and firm age. We adapt a standard model of optimal capital structure choice under corporate taxation, focusing on the financing and investment decisions a young firm is typically faced with. Our model allows to derive testable hypotheses about the relationship between corporate taxation, a firm's age and its debt to asset ratio. To test these hypotheses empirically, we use a cross-section of 405,000 firms from 35 European countries and 126 NACE 3-digit industries. In line with previous research, we find that a firm's debt ratio increases with the corporate tax rate. Further, we observe that older firms exhibit smaller debt ratios than their younger counterparts. Finally, consistent with our theoretical expectation, we find a positive interaction effect between corporate taxation and firm age, indicating that the impact of corporate taxation on debt is increasing over a firm's life-time.Corporate taxation; Capital structure; Firm age

How reliable is pooled analysis in political economy?: the globalization-welfare state nexus revisited

"Panel-Daten erfreuen sich in politisch-ökonomischen Analysen zunehmender Beliebtheit. Allerdings enthalten derartige Daten einige ökonometrische Fallstricke, die wir in der vorliegenden Arbeit aufzeigen. Zur Illustration nehmen wir auf die Diskussion über den Zusammenhang zwischen Globalisierung und Wohlfahrtsstaat Bezug. Dazu greifen wir eine Arbeit von Garrett und Mitchell (2001) auf, in der gezeigt wird, dass Globalisierung und die parteimäßige Zusammensetzung der Regierung einen signifikanten Einfluss auf die Staatstätigkeit ausüben. Wir argumentieren, dass dieses Ergebnis von ihrer Modellspezifikation (dynamische Spezifikation in Niveaugrößen) getrieben wird. Demgegenüber zeigen wir, dass in der vorliegenden Datenkonstellation die statistischen Eigenschaften des Störterms ökonometrisch korrekt nur durch ein autoregressives Modell in ersten Differenzen berücksichtigt werden können. Unter Beachtung von unterschiedlichen Phasen der Internationalisierung finden wir weiters, dass die Staatsausgabentätigkeit primär durch binnenwirtschaftliche Faktoren erklärt wird. Weder Parteieneffekte noch "Globalisierungsphänomene" haben die Veränderung der Staatsausgaben nennenswert beeinflusst." [Autorenreferat]"Panel data analysis has become very popular in comparative political economy. However, in order to draw meaningful inferences from such data, one has to address specification and estimation issues carefully. This paper aims to demonstrate various pitfalls that typically occur in applied empirical work. To illustrate this, we refer to the debate on the globalization-welfare state nexus. We reexamine a model by Garrett and Mitchell (2001), a leading study in this regard. Utilizing a data set of 17 OECD countries and the time period 1961 to 1993, they find evidence that globalization and partisan composition have a significant impact on the extent of public activity. However, because they apply a dynamic specification in levels, they do not adequately take into account both the dynamic and spherical nature of the data. In contrast, we propose an autoregressive model in first differences that is shown to perform well in statistical terms. Further, we explicitly pay attention to the time pattern of the globalization-welfare state nexus. Substantively, we find evidence that government spending is primarily driven by the state of the domestic economy. Neither partisan effects nor the international economic environment have affected public expenditure considerably." [author´s abstract

Corporate Taxation and Multinational Activity

This paper assesses the impact of corporate taxation on multinational activity. A numerically solvable general equilibrium model of trade and multinational firms is used to incorporate the following components of corporate taxation: parent and host country statutory corporate tax rates, withholding tax rates, and parent and host country depreciation allowances. We account for their differential impact under alternative methods of double taxation relief (i.e., credit, exemption, and deduction). The hypotheses regarding the effects of changes in the tax parameters are investigated in a panel of bilateral OECD outbound stocks of foreign direct investment (FDI) from 1991 to 2002. For this, we compile annual information on taxation to construct the largest existing panel of tax parameters at the bilateral level based on national tax law and bilateral tax treaties. Our findings indicate that the parent country's statutory corporate tax rate tends to foster outward FDI, whereas the host country's statutory corporate and withholding tax rates are negatively associated with outward FDI. Depreciation allowances exert a significant impact on FDI, as hypothesized.corporate taxation, foreign, direct investment, panel econometrics

A Note on Merger and Acquisition Evaluation

This note proposes the continuous treatment approach as a valuable alternative to propensity score matching for evaluating economic effects of merger and acquisitions (M&As). This framework allows considering the variation in treatment intensities explicitly, and it does not call for an arbitrary definition of cutoff values in traded ownership shares to construct a binary treatment indicator. We demonstrate the usefulness of this approach using data from European M&As and by relying on the example of post-M&A employment effects. The empirical exercise reveals some heterogeneities over the whole distribution of acquired ownership shares and across different types of M&As and country groups

Österreich und Deutschland - Gemeinsame Wege in der Steuerpolitik, aber wer bestimmt die Richtung?

'Der steuerpolitischen Interaktion zwischen Österreich und Deutschland wurde in der neueren politik- und wirtschaftswissenschaftlichen Literatur vermehrt Aufmerksamkeit zuteil. Wagschal (2001) konnte etwa zeigen, dass die beiden Länder in ihrer Steuerpolitik von einem ähnlichen politisch-institutionellen Hintergrund ausgehen. Die zunehmende Internationalisierung und der daraus resultierende Druck zur Anpassung der Steuersysteme dienen ferner als Erklärung für die erhöhte Steuerreformaktivität in beiden Ländern. Der vorliegende Beitrag ergänzt einige Aspekte von Wagschal (2001) aus ökonomisch-empirischer Sicht. Dazu wir anhand von ökonometrischen Kausalitätstests für die steuerlichen Belastungen von Kapital, Arbeit und Konsum untersucht, ob beide Länder in ihrer Steuerpolitik von internationalen Entwicklungen beeinflusst sind und welches der beiden Nachbarländer dabei die steuerpolitische Vorreiterrolle einnimmt. Im Ergebnis lassen sich beide Fragen nicht eindeutig beantworten. Dies lässt darauf schließen, dass beide Länder vorwiegend eine innenorientierte Steuerpolitik verfolgen, die darauf bedacht ist, die nationalen sozial- und wirtschaftspolitischen trade-offs zu lösen.' (Autorenreferat)'The tax policy of Austria and Germany is characterized by a number of institutional as well as political symmetries. Moreover, many observers have claimed that the tax reform activities in both countries, especially in the 1990s, were caused by the international tax competition, which has emerged in the past 20 years. The objective of this article is to evaluate the impact of tax competition and the interaction between both countries' tax policy with real data. For this purpose, a Granger causality test for both countries is applied by using data of the tax burden on capital, labour and consumption. The result is that in both countries the response to tax competition is almost negligible. Furthermore, no evidence for a unidirectional causality between the tax policy of both countries can be found. Given this evidence, it can be concluded that the tax policy in Austria and Germany primarily aims at finding solutions for the socio-economic trade-offs within their borders.' (author's abstract

Corporate taxation and Mulitnational Activity

This paper assesses the impact of corporate taxation on multinational activity. A numerically solvable general equilibrium model of trade and multinational firms is used to incorporate the following components of corporate taxation: parent and host country statutory corporate tax rates, withholding tax rates, and parent and host country depreciation allowances. We account for their differential impact under alternative methods of double taxation relief (i.e., credit, exemption, and deduction). The hypotheses regarding the effects of changes in the tax parameters are investigated in a panel of bilateral outbound stocks of foreign direct investment (FDI) from 52 parent and 45 host countries for the years 1991 to 2004. For this, we compile annual information on taxation to construct the largest existing panel of tax parameters at the bilateral level based on national tax law and bilateral tax treaties. Our findings indicate that the parent country's statutory corporate tax rate tends to foster outward FDI, whereas the host country's statutory corporate and withholding tax rates are negatively associated with outward FDI. Depreciation allowances exert a significant impact on FDI, as hypothesized