The challenge for fiscal policy in Slovakia is to achieve fiscal consolidation in a way which supports the fragile recovery and protects spending on areas which are important for re-embarking on a trajectory of high trend growth and underpinning a catch-up in living standards. While the recently...

This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth in Poland and four types of taxes and human capital investment. We primarily rely on an exogenous growth model that merges the Mankiw-Romer-Weil model, augmented with learning-by-doing and spillover-effects, with selected elements...

We provide an introduction to optimal fiscal and monetary policy using the primal approach to optimal taxation. We use this approach to address how fiscal and monetary policy should be set over the long run and over the business cycle. We find four substantive lessons for policymaking: Capital...

This chapter critically reviews the literature which explains why and under which circumstances governments accumulate more debt than it would be consistent with optimal fiscal policy. We also discuss numerical rules or institutional designs which might lead to a moderation of these distortions.

The question of what is a sustainable public debt is paramount in the macroeconomic analysis of fiscal policy. This question is usually formulated as asking whether the outstanding public debt and its projected path are consistent with those of the government's revenues and expenditures (ie,...

The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) recently proposed an interest barrier to fight tax base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS). We use the introduction of such an interest deductibility restriction in Germany as a quasi-experiment and find significant corporate...

Die Abgeltungsteuer auf Einkünfte aus Wertpapieranlagen wurde 2009 in Deutschland eingeführt. Damit sollte die bisherige Quellensteuer vereinfacht und die Steuerflucht ins Ausland durch den einheitlichen, relativ niedrigen Steuersatz verhindert werden. Christian Conrad sieht jedoch steuerliche...

Die Einheitswerte für Immobilien, auf die sich die Grundsteuer bezieht, wurden vom Bundesfinanzhof als verzerrend angesehen. Eine Arbeitsgruppe der Finanzminister beschäftigt sich schon seit Anfang 2010 mit diesem Problem. Dabei haben sich drei Modelle herauskristallisiert, die den Boden- und...

Proposals to increase environmentally related taxes are often challenged on competitiveness grounds. The concern is that value creation in certain sectors might decline domestically if a country introduces environmentally related taxes unilaterally. Furthermore, environmental goals might not be...

Das Bundesverfassungsgericht hat am 17.12.2014 über die Verfassungsmäßigkeit der erbschaftsteuerlichen Regelungen zur Verschonung des Betriebsvermögens entschieden und den Gesetzgeber erneut vor eine steuerpolitische Herausforderung gestellt. Im Kern haben die Verfassungsrichter die...