Tax Liability Side Equivalence (tax LSE) claims that the statutory incidence of a tax is irrelevant for its economic incidence. In gift-exchange labor markets, firms provide a gift to workers by paying high wages, and workers reciprocate by providing high efforts. Tax LSE is theoretically...

This paper studies the design of tax systems that implement a planner's second-best allocation in a market economy. An example shows that the widely used Mirrleesian (1976) tax system cannot implement all incentive-compatible allocations. Hammond's (1979) "principle of taxation" proves that any...

The study aims to assess the distributional effects of taxing financial transactions including a focus on gender. It specifically investigates the impact of the low interest rate environment on tax revenues and distribution. The first part of the study is explorative, aiming to develop a concept...

This paper provides evidence over a long time period on the question of who bears the burden of social security contributions (SSC) in Germany. Following Alvaredo et al. (2016) we exploit kinks in the budget set generated by a drop in the marginal SSC rate at earnings caps. Based on...

This paper studies the implications of monopsony power for optimal income taxation and welfare. Firms observe workers' abilities while the government does not and monopsony power determines what share of the labor market surplus is translated into profits. Monopsony power increases the tax...

Empirical evidence so far found ambiguous results for the direction of effect of marginal income tax rates on employee remuneration. Based on the GSOEP data from 2002 through 2008 this study analyzes the impact of the marginal tax load on the employee side on the wage rate also allowing average...

With panel data important issues can be resolved that can not beaddressed with cross--sectional data. A major drawback is that paneldata suffer from more severe missing data problems. Adding a sampleconsisting of new units randomly drawn from the original populationas replacements for units who...

We ask individuals for their reservation price of a specified lotteryand deduce their Arrow-Pratt measure of risk aversion.This allows direct testing of common hypotheses on risk attitudes inthree datasets. We find that risk aversion indeed fallswith income and wealth. Entrepreneurs are less...

We analyze the empirical violation of the Hillman condition, a necessary and sufficient condition for the correspondence between comparative advantage and pre-trade relative prices. Our comprehensive data set allows us to investigate the Hillman condition for virtually all countries of the...