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In a seminal paper Graetz and Michaels (2018) find that robots increase labor productivity and TFP, lower output prices and adversely affect the employment share of lowskilled labor. We demonstrate that these effects are heavily influenced by the sample composition and argue that focusing on manufacturing and mining sectors mitigates unobserved heterogeneity and is more coherent with an identification strategy that rests on instruments that do not vary by industries. In sum, this leads to more plausible results regarding the overall economic effects of robotization, whereby the focus on robotizing industries leads to a sizable drop of the productivity effects, halving the effect size for labor productivity and insignificant price effects. The most pronounced consequences from the sample choice occur for labor market outcomes, where significant negative employment effects become insignificant and positive wage effects are reversed into the opposite. We show that controlling for demographic workforce characteristics is essential for obtaining significant labor productivity effects and leads to the negative effects of robots on wages. Additionally, investigating only robotizing sectors does not corroborate skill-biased technological change due to robotization, but rather, indicates towards labor market polarization. Finally, we document a non-monotonicity in one of the instruments, which calls for caution in the use of that instrument.

We study donor loyalty in the context of church membership in Germany. Church members have to make substantial payments to their church but can opt out at any time. In a large-scale field experiment, we examine how private recognition for past payments affects church members’ loyalty. We find that recognizing past payments in a letter significantly reduces opt-outs. This effect is driven by members in the bottom quartile of baseline payments to the church. Consistent with optimization frictions prior to the experiment, we observe a spike in opt-outs immediately after treatment for particularly costly memberships.

Within a politico-economic model we first establish three hypotheses: (i) Retirees generally prefer a higher retirement age than workers, whereby just retired individuals prefer the highest retirement age, (ii) in equilibrium the level of the legal retirement age is increasing in longevity and (iii) decreasing in the public pension replacement rate. We then test these hypotheses empirically. Employing micro data for Germany we corroborate the first hypothesis with descriptive regressions and a fuzzy regression discontinuity (FRD) design. We show that just retired individuals are indeed most in favor of an increase in the legal retirement age. On the basis of cross country panel IV regressions we provide evidence for the second and third hypothesis. We demonstrate that a one percentage point increase in the share of the elderly increases the legal retirement age by 0.3 to 0.5 years, and that a 10 percentage point increase in the replacement rate reduces the legal retirement age by 0.5 to 3 years. We conclude that if policy contains the generosity of public pensions, increasing the legal retirement age becomes politically more feasible.

Die Digitalisierung der Gesellschaft und Wirtschaft stellt neben dem Klimawandel, der Globalisierung und dem demographischen Wandel einen der treibenden Trends unserer Zeit dar. Der digitale Wandel wird stark durch den technologischen Fortschritt und die Adaptions- bzw. Absorptionsfähigkeit der Gesellschaft vorangetrieben. Mit der Digitalisierung einhergehend werden massive Transformationsprozesse innerhalb des Arbeitsmarkts, Bildungssystems, der Produktionsprozesse der Unternehmen und bei den Präferenzen der Konsumenten erwartet. Globalisierte und wettbewerbsorientierte Märkte tragen dazu bei die Innovation und den Diffusionsprozess der neuen Technologien und deren Anwendungen zu verstärken.

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.

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.

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.

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 in uence 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.

Using German administrative income tax data we investigate economic consequences of an increasingly secular society for prosocial behavior. For this purpose, we establish initially a simple household model to formalize the relationship between religious giving in form of the German church tax and other tax deductible donations. We test the model hypotheses empirically and compare how income and the tax-price of giving differ as incentives to give between individuals leaving church and church members. While we find evidence for crowding in between religious giving and other donations for church members, we do not observe such a relation for church leavers. Moreover, donation behavior of church-leavers is much more responsive to tax incentives of charitable giving compared to church members. Moreover, we find that non-donors have a significantly increased probability of leaving church compared to donors. We trace this results back to the fact that non-donors are not able to compensate higher church taxes by reducing their donations.