The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political...

In order to calculate the burden of a comprehensive and progressive income tax falling on a certain income source, an apportionment scheme for the entire tax burden has to be chosen. This raises the question of how to deal with losses, which is relevant for Germany in view of the heavy losses...

School education in Germany is under the responsibility of the federal states and as a consequence average grades differ widely across regions. Since school leavers apply nationwide for admission to university, regional provenance may thus matter a lot for the success probability in the...

In Germany, the tax loss carry-forward of corporations significantly increased over the last decade. At the same time only a small percentage of losses have been effectively offset in the following periods. One potential reason for this puzzle is that stricter loss offset restrictions have been...

Using a firm-level panel data set I assess whether dynamic models of investment provide an empirically fruitful framework for analyzing tax effects on changes in capital stock. In particular I estimate a one-step error correction model (ECM) complementing the usual estimation of a distributed...

We estimate the elasticity of corporate taxable income with respect to the effective corporate tax rate on the basis of a pseudo-panel constructed from corporate tax return micro data for the period 1998-2001, a period which saw the introduction of a major corporate tax reform in Germany....

What began as a financial crisis in the United States in 2007-2008 quickly evolved into a massive crisis of the global real economy. We investigate the importance of the bank lending and firm borrowing channel in the international transmission of bank distress to the real economy — in...

We analyze the top tail of the wealth distribution in Germany, France, Spain, and Greece based on the Household Finance and Consumption Survey (HFCS). Since top wealth is likely to be underrepresented in household surveys we integrate the big fortunes from rich lists, estimate a Pareto...

We estimate the impact of effective profit taxation on the financial leverage of corporations on the basis of a pseudo-panel constructed from corporate tax return micro data for the period 1998-2001, a period which saw the introduction of a major corporate tax reform in Germany. The financial...

Taxing local business is a common feature of local public finance in many countries. The German local business tax (Gewerbesteuer) is the main tax revenue source of municipalities in Germany. Liberal professionals, however, have traditionally been exempted from it. In the past, the German...