A widespread objection to the introduction of consumption tax systems claims that this would lead to high tax revenue losses. This paper investigates the revenue effects of a consumption tax reform in Germany. Our results suggest that the revenue losses would be surprisingly low. We find a...

On 3 June 2020, the German government announced a temporary value added tax (VAT) rate reduction. VAT rates were reduced on 1 July 2020 and went back to their previous level on 1 January 2021. We study the price effects of the temporary VAT rate reduction using a web-scraped data set covering...

This paper is the first to use information from individual country-by-country (CbC) re-ports to assess the extent of profit shifting by multinational enterprises. Unlike other data often used to evaluate the extent of profit shifting and tax avoidance, CbC reports pro-vide a complete coverage of...

This paper examines the effects of real estate transfer taxes (RETT) on property prices using a rich micro dataset of roughly 17 million German properties for the period from 2005 to 2019. We exploit a 2006 constitutional reform that allows states to set their own RETT rates, leading to frequent...

This paper presents scenarios of the shutdown costs in terms of lost value added for Austria, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Switzerland and UK. The shutdown phase will lead to considerable production losses and large declines in GDP this year. Lasting longer than a month, the losses within the...

This study uses scenario calculations to estimate the economic costs of the partial closure of the economy due to the coronavirus epidemic. With a shutdown duration of two months, the costs reach between EUR 255 billion and EUR 495 billion, depending on the scenario, and reduce the annual growth...