Working Papers
with Elena Herold
What happens to earnings upon marriage? Linking administrative and survey data from Germany, we show that there is a marriage earnings gap. Even after accounting for the child penalty, women’s earnings drop by 20% after marriage. We show that the marriage earnings gap results from both the extensive margin (women stop working) and the intensive margin (women work fewer hours), but not from a decrease in hourly wages. Labor supply disincentives from joint taxation can explain about one third of the marriage earnings gap, while we find no effect for labor supply incentives from changes in divorce law. Leveraging variation in norms created by the German separation, we find that gender norms are another important driver behind the marriage earnings gap.
Many countries have automatic wage tax withholding systems with tax non-filing options for some taxpayers. We show that this has sizable and potentially unintended implications for effective taxation because taxes are often over-withheld. Low-income taxpayers pay more taxes than they have to be-cause they frequently do not file. Using German administrative tax data, we document that the average non-filer overpays 119€ in one year, equivalent to a 1.2 percentage point increase in the average tax rate. Non-filing acts like reverse evasion: It weakens the effective tax progressivity by increasing tax rates at the bottom of the income distribution.
Media coverage (German): Handelsblatt
Policy report (German): Automatische Einkommensteuererstattungen zur Entlastung niedriger Einkommen. Wirtschaftsdienst 101, 956–959 (2021).
Work in Progress
Opt-in or Opt-out? The Effect of Defaults on Public Pension Enrollment
with Tabea Bucher-Koenen and Joachim Winter)
On the effects of the child-age dependent reform of alimony in Germany
with David Koll
Lost in Deduction: Taxpayers' Mistakes when Itemizing
Publications
Rising Income Tax Complexity, with Youssef Benzarti, 2024, forthcoming at National Tax Journal. Media coverage (German): Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung