After the inheritance tax ruling by the German Federal Constitutional Court, legislators will have to limit the wide-ranging exemptions on company assets. In recent years, they have exempted half of all assets subject to inheritance tax. In particular, large transfers consisting mainly of corporate assets benefit from the favorable conditions. In 2012 and 2013, over half of all transfers of five million ...
Local business profits respond to local business tax (LBT) rates that vary across municipalities. We estimate that a one percent increase in the LBT rate decreases the LBT base by 0.45 percent, based on the universe of German LBT return files, which include corporations and unincorporated businesses. However, the fiscal equalization scheme largely compensates municipalities for the loss in the LBT ...
This article empirically investigates the effects of differential income taxation on households' portfolio choice and asset allocation, applying a two-stage budgeting model of asset demand to German survey data. The model is structured into the discrete and the continuous asset choice. Cross-sectional variation in marginal tax rates, appropriately instrumented, as well as over-time variation from a ...
How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this question, we use micro data to estimate a structural life-cycle model of individuals' employment, retirement and consumption decisions. We calculate that, in the case of Germany, an increase of 3.76 years in the pension age thresholds or a cut of 26.8% in the per-year value ...
We empirically derive the welfare effects of a shift from joint to individual taxation of married households in Germany. For the welfare evaluation we estimate the preference heterogeneity and use normative welfare concepts proposed by Fleurbaey (2006) to address the difficulties of comparison between and aggregation of heterogeneous agents. Our results suggest that the normative choice of the welfare ...
Hauptaugenmerk dieser Arbeit liegt auf dem Einfluss der Besteuerung auf die Finanzierungsstruktur und Investitionen von Unternehmen. Die Relevanz dieser Thematik wurde als erstes von Modigliani und Miller (1958) herausgestellt. Sie haben gezeigt, dass Investitions- und Finanzierungsentscheidungen von Unternehmen nur bei vollkommenen Märkten voneinander unabhängig sind. Es ist daher von großem Interesse, ...
A large body of literature points out that joint taxation of married couples with full income splitting (Ehegattensplitting) is an important reason for the relatively low labor force participation of married women in Germany. This paper investigates the relative gains of joint taxation for married couples by comparing effective tax burdens for three groups of tax units between Germany and the UK. Using ...
Financial support for families with children implies inherent trade-offs some of which are less obvious than others. In the end these trade-offs determine the effectiveness of policy with respect to the material situation of families and employment of their parents. We analyse several kinds of trade-offs involved using a careful selection of potential changes to the system of financial support for ...
