This paper analyzes the effectiveness of social protection systems in Europe and the US to provide (income) insurance against macro level shocks in terms of automatic stabilizers. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38% of a proportional income shock and 47% of an idiosyncratic...

We study deception choices and deception detection in a tax compliance experiment. We find large systematic differences in individual deception abilities. Tax payers are conscious about their own deception abilities. The empirical outcomes are in line with a theory suggesting that tax payers...

One central lesson of the sovereign debt crisis is that the Eurozone (and the EU) needs institutional reform. Many observers argue that the monetary union should be complemented by a fiscal union . In this paper we provide the first quantitative analysis of important economic effects of an EU...

Dieser Beitrag vergleicht die automatischen Stabilisierungswirkungen der Steuer- und Transfersysteme in der Europäischen Union und in den USA in der aktuellen Wirtschaftskrise. Dazu werden zwei Szenarien simuliert: erstens ein proportionaler Einkommensschock, in dem alle Bruttoeinkommen um 5...

This paper investigates to what extent the tax and transfer systems in Europe protect households at different income levels against losses in current income caused by economic downturns like the present financial crisis. We use a multi country micro simulation model to analyse how shocks on...

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of the tax and transfer systems in the European Union and the US to act as an automatic stabilizer in the current economic crisis. We find that automatic stabilizers absorb 38 per cent of a proportional income shock in the EU, compared to 32 per cent in the...

Restrictions on work hours are more important in countries with a large welfare state. We show that this empirical observation is consistent with the strategic effects of such restrictions in a welfare state in the context of optimal direct taxation in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971). Our...

This paper considers education investment and public education subsidies in closed and open economies with an extortionary government. The extortionary government in a closed economy has incentives to subsidize education in order to overcome a hold-up problem of time consistent taxation, similar...

Incomplete information is a commitment device for time consistency problems. In the contextof time consistent labor income taxation privacy can lead to a Pareto superior outcome and increases the effectiveness of public education as a second best policy.