This paper is concerned with fiscal externalities arising from local taxation of a mobile factor. Using a panel of more 1100 local jurisdictions it provides empirical evidence on how the local tax rate as well as the tax rate in the neighborhood affect the local tax base. The results support the...

This paper analyzes the occurrence of political budget cycles in 604 West German cities between 1975 and 2007. Due to the idiosyncratic timing of state and local elections, the budgetary changes before elections at two tiers of the federalist government can be separately estimated and can also...

By applying a Structural Vector Autoregressive (SVAR) approach this paper estimates the effects of fiscal policy shocks of different government sub-sectors on aggregate GDP in Germany. From a general government perspective, the results show that besides investment, it is particularly changes in...

Despite strongly equalized per capita revenue and similar budgetary institutions, fiscal performance is increasingly diverging across German federal states. Given that state and local governments are endowed with expenditure autonomy, this paper investigates whether the composition of...

This paper addresses the question of how firms react to tax incentives in a formula apportionment (FA) tax regime. Under FA, profits of all consolidated entities of a business group are summed and then allocated according to a formula based on FA factors. We hypothesize that firms may change the...

We review the empirical literature about the implications of the computerization of the labor market to see whether it can explain observed computer adoption patterns and (long-term) changes in the wage structure. Evidence from empirical micro studies turns out to be inconsistent with macro...

Gender wage and employment gaps are negatively correlated across countries. We argue that non-random selection of women into work explains an important part of such correlation and thus of the observed variation in wage gaps. The idea is that, if women who are employed tend to have relatively...