The economic literature often argues that basic income schemes and low wage subsidies to employees are just special cases of a negative income tax. In this debate, it is ignored that these concepts target different population subgroups. This paper investigates the different target groups and the...

Since 1970 public debt in Germany has risen dramatically. The debt growth has neither been stopped by the constitutional deficit limit, nor by the European Stability and Growth Pact. At the moment, the cyclical upswing triggers increasing tax revenues and diminishing deficits. Yet this does not...

The introduction of a flat tax is supposed to have several advantages. Administration and compliance costs are reduced, as well as incentives for tax evasion. Furthermore, positive employment and growth effects are expected. Despite these advantages, a flat rate tax is not very popular in most...

The success of the flat rate tax in Eastern Europe suggests that this concept could also be a model for the welfare states of Western Europe. The present paper uses a simulation model to analyse the effects of revenue neutral flat rate tax reforms on equity and efficiency for the case of...

This paper estimates the incidence of corporate taxes on wages using a 20-year panel of German municipalities. Administrative linked employer-employee data allows estimating heterogeneous worker and firm effects. We set up a general theoretical framework showing that corporate taxes can have a...

Because of endogeneity problems very few studies have been able to identify the incidence of corporate taxes on wages. We circumvent these problems by using an 11-year panel of data on 11,441 German municipalities' tax rates, 8 percent of which change each year, linked to administrative matched...