This paper revisits the personal expenditure tax (PET), the most prominent version of a progressive consumption tax. The PET has a long intellectual tradition in economics, and the merits and demerits of this alternative to the personal income tax have been discussed at length. What has been...

This paper tests whether the Ricardian Equivalence proposition holds in a life cycle consumption laboratory experiment. This proposition is a fundamental assumption underlying numerous studies on intertemporal choice and has important implications for tax policy. Using nonparametric and panel...

I calculate unemployment multipliers of fiscal consolidation policies in a standard, closed-economy New Keynesian framework with search and matching frictions, and, as an innovation, in the presence of sectoral heterogeneity. Family and non-family firms behave differently in the labor market and...

This paper assesses how a permanent shift from financing a public pay-as-you-go pension by direct (labour income) taxation towards financing it by indirect(consumption) taxation affects the economy and welfare. To this end, we use anoverlapping-generations-augmented two-region general...

This paper investigates empirically the consumer demand of environmentally relevant goods for Germany, as well as their relationship to the demand for leisure. Higher prices for energy goods like gas, electricity or fuel oil due to higher indirect taxation amongst others may have serious welfare...

As part of Germany’s fiscal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, parents received three payments totalling e450 per child. Randomization in the payment dates and daily scanner data allow us to identify the effects of these transfers on household spending. We find a significant but small spending...