Calcifying marine organisms will generally find it harder to make and maintain their carbonate skeletons as increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO 2 acidify the oceans. Nevertheless, some types of organisms will be damaged more than others, and some may even benefit from higher CO 2 levels. Coccolithophores are a case in point, because their photosynthetic ability is strongly carbon-limite...

The divergences developed within the euro area represent the main threat to the existence of the single currency and to the stability of the EU as a whole. Without proper automatic stabilisers, a monetary union can only deliver suboptimal results and may not even be sustainable. In the recent years, common unemployment insurance has been examined as one of the possible ways to improve the funct...

Generous early retirement provisions account for a large proportion of the drop in the labor force participation of elderly workers. The aim of this paper is to provide a positive theory of early retirement. We suggest that the political support for generous early retirement provisions relies on: (i) the existence of a significant group of elderly workers with incomplete working history, who ar...

Starting in January 2003, Germany implemented the first two socalled Hartz reforms, followed by the third and fourth packages of Hartz reforms in January 2004 and January 2005, respectively. The aim of these reforms was to accelerate labor market flows and reduce unemployment duration. Without attempting to evaluate the specific components of these Hartz reforms, this paper provides a first att...

This paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, by employing a macrolevel institutional dataset on benefit levels for social assistance (SA) and minimum income protection (MIP) in 22 European countries in the period 1990–2013, I show that the adequacy of income support for low-income inactive individuals in European welfare states has been steadily decreasing since 1994. Second, th...

Germany is in a dilemma. Low wage competition via product and factor markets increases the demands on the welfare state, but increased systems competition in the context of international factor mobility reduces the possibilities of maintaining it. The welfare state has important allocative functions. It is an insurance against career risks and it stimulates risk taking and economic growth. Howe...

In this paper we analyze the attitudes of residents of transition countries with speci…c focus on whether they have a strong taste for income redistribution. We implement emprical strategies to test the implications of the basic theoretical models in the literature regarding preferences for redistribution. Empirical models of survey respondent’s preference for redistribution, willingness to pay...

This paper provides a life-cycle framework for weighing up the insurance value of disability bene ts agains the incentive cost. Within this framework, we estimate the life-cycle risks that individuals face in the US, as well as the parameters governing the disability insurance program, using indirect inference and longitudinal data on consumption, disability status, disability insurance receipt...

We evaluate the treatment e¤ect of disability grant program using matching methods. A variety of propensity score matching methods applied, show that, on average, the disability grant program has large and signi…cant e¤ects on lowering labour force participation rates of grant recipients. In particular the General Household Survey data we use show that labour force participation rates of Disabi...