This paper provides new evidence that taxes affect capital structure choice, using a unique and comprehensive panel data set which covers 86,173 German non-financial firms over the years 1973–2008. Following the Graham methodology to simulate marginal tax rates, we find a statistically and...

Since 2002 the German government seeks to stimulate private retirement savings by means of special allowances and tax exemptions - the so-called Riester scheme. We apply matching and panel regression techniques to assess the impact of the Riester scheme on households' propensities to save in a...

I estimate permanent and transitory tax-price and income elasticity of charitable giving in Germany using a rich panel data of tax return for the years 2001-2006. Income tax reforms were implemented in 2004 and 2005. The results suggest that the permanent tax-price elasticity varies...

This paper investigates the inter-temporal loss usage of tax units in Germany. Tax units that experience a loss in a year can offset that loss with positive income from adjacent year to receive a tax refund. Similar to companies, tax units can employ losses as carry-back in the year before the...

Governmental activities in welfare states influence private charitable giving predominantly in two ways: (1) government spending on the provision of public goods may cause crowding out of private charitable contributions; and (2) tax incentives may boost private charitable giving. For a rich...

We empirically investigate the distributional consequences of the Riester scheme, the main private pension subsidization program in Germany. We find that 38% of the aggregate subsidy accrues to the top two deciles of the population, but only 7.3% to the bottom two. Nonetheless the Riester scheme...