The article treats the history of Germany’s Great Inflation from 1914 to 1923. It focusses on explaining the turning points of wholesale price trends. It demonstrates that these were mostly triggered by national and international political decisions immediately impacting the mark exchange...

Germany’s hyperinflation resulted from a confluence of several factors, all of which contributed to a temporary breakdown in state capacity and to unsustainable public sector deficits. Wartime debt deflated by 90% already in 1920. Informal wage indexation and failure to enforce collection of a...

We compare trends in mortality, nutritional status and food supply to other living standard indicators for the early years of the Nazi period. We find that Germany experienced a substantial increase in mortality rates in most age groups in the mid-1930s, even relative to those of 1932, the worst...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

This article presents a systematic and extensive empirical study on the presence of Markov switching dynamics in three dollar-based exchange rates. A Monte Carlo approach is adopted to circumvent the statistical inference problem inherent to the test of regime-switching behavior. Two data...

The paper analyses the financial structure of German inward FDI. From a tax perspective, intra-company loans granted by the parent should be all the more strongly preferred over equity the lower the tax rate of the parent and the higher the tax rate of the German affiliate. From our study of a...

The idea of fiscal decentralisation has become increasingly fashionable world-wide. But every country has unique features of the intergovernmental fiscal system. In general municipal expenditures are rapidly growing in European countries. On the other hand local tax increases are not easily...

Using data for German and Swedish multinational enterprises (MNEs), this paper assesses international employment patterns. It analyzes determinants of location choice and the degree of substitutability of labor across locations. Countries with highly skilled labor forces attract German MNEs, but...

In this paper we test whether German public debt has been sustainable by resorting to a test proposed by Bohn (1998). We apply non-parametric and semi-parametric regressions with time depending coefficients. This test shows that the mean of the coefficient relevant for sustainability has been...

A theoretical analysis considers the impact of a typical system of redistributive fiscal equalizationʺ transfers on the taxing effort of local jurisdictions. More specifically, it shows that the marginal contribution rate, i.e. the rate at which an increase in the tax base reduces those...