Publications
"Accounting for Limited Commitment between Spouses when Estimating Labor-Supply Elasticities" (with Christian Bredemeier and Falko Juessen),
Review of Economic Dynamics, Vol. 51, December 2023, pages 547-578. [Link]
"Estimating Labor-Supply Elasticities mit Joint Borrowing Constraints of Couples" (with Christian Bredemeier and Falko Juessen),
Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 37, no. 4, October 2019, pages 1215-1265. [Link]
"The Frisch Consumption Elasticity"
Elgar Encyclopedia of Consumption, accepted for publication. [Link zur WP version]
Projects
Together with co-authors (Christian Bredemeier, Marie Gruen, and Falko Juessen) I work on various projects related to family economics and labor markets:
"Household Taxation, Consumption Insurance, and Welfare",
"Assortative Matching on Risk Aversion, Consumption Insurance, and Progressive Income Taxation",
"Consumption Insurance with Limited Commitment between Spouses",
"For Better for Worse: Commitment Implications of the Joint Taxation of Couples",
"Choose wisely: Implications of the Survivor Benefits on Assortative Mating and Education"
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Project
Currently, I hold a research position in the DFG-funded project "Intrahousehold Commitment in a Dynamic Collective Environment".
Project description: The family is an important economic institution. However, it has undergone striking changes since many policies were designed that are important for the family, such as social insurance or the tax system. Today, most families are dual-earner households, and the dissolution of households has been facilitated by the possibility of unilateral divorce. Both developments strengthen individual family members’ independence, but also weaken their commitment to the family. Policy recommendations should therefore be derived from models that, unlike the widely used unitary model of the household, take into account these characteristics of modern families. An appropriate framework for this purpose is the "limited commitment" approach, which accounts for potential, and changing, conflicts of interest between family members.
A first objective of the project is to understand how limited commitment affects spouses’ ability to insure one another against shocks and how it affects the costs of this insurance. This has important implications for how well family insurance can substitute for public insurance. A second objective is to understand and quantify the inefficiencies that limited commitment imposes on family life and to provide recommendations how to design policies that help families minimize these inefficiencies. A third objective is to improve empirical knowledge about the severity of commitment problems in the household and the relative importance of their determinants.