Who wants (them) to work longer?

This paper examines age-specific individual preferences for the legal retirement age. Within a theoretical model, we develop the hypothesis that retirees prefer a higher legal retirement age than workers, and that newly retired individuals prefer the highest retirement age. Retirees benefit from a positive fiscal externality. A higher legal retirement age leads to higher pension benefits, without retirees having to bear the costs in the form of a longer working life. We corroborate the hypothesis empirically with a fuzzy regression discontinuity design and show that newly retired individuals are indeed most in favor of an increasing retirement age. We conclude that in aging societies the political feasibility of raising the legal retirement age increases

Housing and health

Deprived housing conditions have long been recognized as a source of poor health. Never- theless, there is scant empirical evidence of a causal relationship between housing and health. The literature identifies two different pathways by which housing deprivation affects health, namely, neighborhood effects and the effects of the individual dwelling unit. However, a joint examination of both pathways is absent from the literature. Moreover, endogeneity is a substantial concern in analyses of these two problems. Thus far, studies addressing endogeneity concerns have done so through experimental design or instrumental variables. While the first approach suffers from problems of external validity, we demonstrate the sub- stantial diffculty in identifying robust and reliable instruments for the latter. Consequently, we adopt an alternative strategy to identify the causal effects of housing on health in 21 European countries by estimating fixed-effect models and considering both sources of endo- geneity, neighborhoods and dwellings. Furthermore, using the panel dimension of our data, we reveal the accumulation dynamics of poor housing conditions. Our results indicate that living in poor housing is the chief socioeconomic determinant of health over the four-year observation period and that bad housing is a decisive, causal transmission pathway by which socioeconomic status affects health

Remittances and public finances : evidence from oil-price shocks

We study the effect of inflowing remittances - a major source of capital for many countries - on tax-revenues and tax-policy. Instrumenting remittances with changes in the oil-price interacted with a country's distance to oil-producing countries, we find that remittances have a large positive effect on VAT revenues but no effect on income-tax revenues. This suggests that remittances often escape the income tax but can be taxed via consumption. We further show that tax policy is responsive to shocks in incoming remittances: remittances make the adoption of VAT-systems more likely, and they lead to lower VAT-rates and higher income-tax rates

On tax evasion, entrepreneurial generosity and fungible assets

We estimate the effects of income from various sources on charitable giving using administrative German income tax data. We demonstrate that charitable con- tributions are not uniformly affected by different income types. While business and capital income exhibit a positive effect, the remaining income sources do not in uence charity on statistically significant levels. This exercise is not new and has been conducted for (at least) three different purposes: 1) Relying on the described results, a public finance researcher would state that business and capital income are more prone to tax evasion than the remaining income sources. 2) An entrepreneurship researcher would conclude that business owners are more generous than employees, and 3) a researcher testing the validity of the life cycle theory (or its behavioral counterpart) would refute the fungibility of income. In contrast, we argue that none of these approaches can answer the intended question if solicitation effects of fundraising or measurement error of the income sources are not taken into account. Applying a fixed effect poisson model, we demonstrate that under certain assumptions the results can have a meaningful interpretation

Philanthropy in a secular society

In this study we investigate the relationship between religious and charitable giving. We test how income, the tax-price of giving and the German church tax, differently affect charitable donations of church members, individuals leaving church and nonchurch members. We find crowding in between the church tax and charitable giving for church members, but not for the church-leavers. In contrast to church members, donations of church-leavers and non-members are also highly responsive to the tax deductibility. Additionally, non-donors exhibit a significantly increased probability of leaving church compared to donors. Finally, we demonstrate that leaving church increases donations on the extensive margin but decrease giving along the intensive margin

Paid and unpaid labor in nonprofit-organizations. Does the subsitutions effect exist?

In nonprofit organizations (NPOs) volunteers often work alongside paid workers. Such a coproduction setting can lead to tension between the two worker groups. This paper examines for the first time if and how volunteers influence the separation of paid employees, and thus it contributes to the debate over whether volunteers can substitute paid workers. Using Austrian data on an organizational level we find a significant impact of volunteers on the separations of paid workers in NPOs facing increased competition. These findings support the assumption that a partial substitution effect exists between paid workers and volunteers. (authors' abstract)Series: Working Papers / Institut für Sozialpoliti

Forschung und Entwicklung in Krisenzeiten

Im Zuge von Wirtschaftskrisen nehmen finanzielle Beschränkungen für Unternehmen häufig zu. Diese Liquiditätsengpässe dämpfen auch F&E-Investitionen, die gerade in ökonomisch schwierigen Zeiten, aufgrund der geringeren Opportunitätskosten, verstärkt unternommen werden sollten. Daher empfehlen sich stärker antizyklisch ausgerichtete wirtschaftspolitische Maßnahmen im Bereich der Liquidität und der direkten Forschungsförderung. Dadurch bleiben bei liquiditätsbeschränkten Unternehmen F&E-Kapazitäten erhalten und bei liquiden Unternehmen wird die Wirksamkeit der F&E-Förderungen erhöht