Die „Erzbergerschen Steuer- und Finanzreformen“ 1919/20 haben das deutsche Steuer- und Finanzsystem nahezu vollständig umgestaltet, modernisiert und stark ausgebaut. Wesentliche Elemente dieser Reformen haben bis heute Bestand– die Grundstrukturen des Steuersystems und der Steuerrechtsordnung sowie der zentralistische kooperative Finanzföderalismus. Das NS-Regime konsolidierte die Reformen und erhöhte ...
This paper studies the impact of immigration on public policy setting. We exploit the sudden arrival of eight million forced migrants in West Germany after WWII. These migrants were poorer than the local population but had full voting rights and were eligible for social welfare. We show that cities responded to this shock with selective tax raises and shifts in spending. Voting data suggests that these ...
The use of video recordings in experimental economics has become increasingly popular. However, little attention is paid to how this might affect the composition of the participating subjects and the intended treatment effect. We make a first attempt to shed light on these issues and address them in an incentivized face-to-face tax compliance experiment. The experiment contains two dimensions; i) the ...
Duties and taxes on cars are an important source of revenue for European governments and the tax systems are also designed with the goal of achieving environmental policy objectives. A systematic and quantitative comparison of passenger car taxation in 30 European countries shows significant differences among them. However, in almost every country, the use of vehicles with diesel engines is taxed less ...
Regulatory bank levies set incentives for banks to reduce leverage. At the same time, corporate income taxation makes funding through debt more attractive. In this paper, we explore how regulatory levies affect bank capital structure, depending on corporate income taxation. Based on bank balance sheet data from 2006 to 2014 for a panel of EU-banks, our analysis yields three main results: The introduction ...
In recent years, the global community has promoted several initiatives aimed at breaking bank secrecy in tax havens. Such treaties for the exchange of information among tax offices can be effective. A treaty between country A and tax haven B reduces deposits from A in banks of B by approximately 30 percent. However, the analysis shows that tax evaders react to such treaties not by becoming honest taxpayers ...
This study evaluates the impact of fuel taxes on new car purchases, using exhaustive individual-level data of monthly new car registrations in France. We use information on the car holder to account for heterogeneous preferences across purchasers, and we identify demand parameters through the large oil price fluctuations of this period. We find that the short-term sensitivity of demand with respect ...
The shift away from coal is at the heart of the global low-carbon transition. Can governments of coal-producing countries help facilitate this transition and benefit from it? This paper analyses the case for coal taxes as supply-side climate policy implemented by large coal exporting countries. Coal taxes can reduce global carbon dioxide emissions and benefit coal-rich countries through improved terms-of-trade ...
In aging societies, information on how to reform pension systems is essential to policy makers. This study scrutinizes effects of early retirement disincentives on retirement behavior, individual welfare, pensions and public budget. We employ administrative pension data and a detailed model of the German tax and social security system to estimate a structural dynamic retirement model. We find that ...