Topic Taxes

Better Early than Never – The Effects of Anticipated Gift Tax Changes on Business Transfers

Wealth transfer taxes are important instruments to counter increasing wealth inequality. Yet, inter-generational business transfers, whose distribution is particularly concentrated at the top, are inherently difficult to tax. This is due to preferential tax treatments in many countries and sophisticated tax avoidance strategies by business owners. We analyze how business transfers react to...

Global Tax Evasion: How large is the problem and what to do about it?

Is global tax evasion falling or rising? Are new issues emerging, and if so, what are they? Have governments been effective in addressing tax evasion over the past 10 years? What has worked so far and what are some policies for the future? Gabriel Zucman, founding director of the EU Tax Observatory, and Sarah Godar will present key result from the inaugural Global Tax Evasion Report. The report...

Higher fossil fuel prices and a climate dividend: burdens on and relief of households

EU Tax Observatory

The EU Tax Observatory is an independent research laboratory hosted at the Paris School of Economics and DIW is the national cooperation partner.  It conducts innovative research on taxation, contributes to a democratic and inclusive debate on the future of taxation, and fosters a dialogue between the scientific community, civil society, and policymakers in the European Union and worldwide.

The Gender (Tax) Gap in Parental Transfers. Evidence from administrative inheritance and gift tax data.

This study examines how inheritance and gift tax systems in combination with gendered parental transfer behavior strengthen gender wealth inequalities. Gender differences in transfers can be reproduced if men benefit differently than women from tax exemptions. This might happen when men and women receive different types of assets where only some are tax exempted. To investigate gendered parental...

GETTSIM – Contributions to an Open Source Tax- and Transfers Simulator

This project serves to further develop the open source software GETTSIM. GETTSIM is a simulation model written in the programming language Python, which can depict the German tax and transfer system. The software offers a multitude of applications in research and teaching. It is developed in cooperation with the IZA (Institute of Labor Economics) as well as other German research institutes and...

Do Business Tax Rates Affect Real Investment?

Policymakers widely use tax-based incentives to spur investment and stimulate economic growth. Tax policy has been at the center of emergency measures during the Covid-19 pandemic, and it is now as countries face a significant deterioration in public finances. Yet, empirical tax research is still in disagreement on how taxes affect business investment. We investigate the effect of local business...

Wealth policy instruments and wealth inequality

Development of a dynamic framework to depict and compare the effects of wealth policy instruments in the short, medium, and long term. Among the examined instruments are a general wealth tax, a social inheritance, and a social dividend.

The role of inherited wealth for wealth inequality in Germany

In this project, a top-corrected wealth distribution is estimated on the basis of the inheritance tax statistics and the SOEP. We analyze the concentration of wealth, the portfolios of the wealthy, the importance of inherited wealth, the gender inheritance gap and the gender wealth gap as well as reactions to inheritance taxation.

Hours Risk and Wage Risk: Repercussions over the Life Cycle

We decompose earnings risk into contributions from hours and wage shocks. To distinguish between hours shocks, modeled as innovations to the marginal disutility of work, and labor supply reactions to wage shocks, we formulate a life-cycle model of consumption and labor supply. For estimation, we use data on married American men from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Permanent wage shocks explain ...