Empirical evidence on the degree of business-tax shifting to employees via the wage level is highly controversial and rare. It remains open to which extent the tax burden is shifted, whether there are differences for tax increases and decreases, or whether there exists some treatment...

Germany taxes electricity use since 1999. The government granted reduced rates to energy intensive firms in the industrial sector for addressing potentially adverse effects on firms' competitiveness. Firms that use more electricity than certain thresholds established by legislation, pay reduced...

This paper investigates the economic impacts of environmental tax reforms designed to reach given emission reduction targets for the German economy. Our focus is on the efficiency and employment implications of alternative schemes for emission tax differentiation between the production sector...

We investigate the effect of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) on the economic performance of manufacturing firms in Germany. Our difference-in-differences framework relies on several parametric conditioning strategies and nearest neighbor matching. As a measure of economic...

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...

Shifting taxes from labor income to consumption is regularly suggested as a measure to induce work incentives. We investigate the effect of increases in the Value Added Tax on labor supply and the income distribution in Germany, which is compensated by a revenue-neutral reduction in...

We use a behavioural microsimulation model embedded in a numerical optimization procedure in order to identify optimal (social welfare maximizing) tax-transfer rules. We consider the class of tax-transfer rules consisting of a universal basic income and a tax defined by a 4th degree polynomial....

This paper deals with designing emissions trading in practice. After a short introduction to the general idea of emissions trading, practical requirements for the introduction of an emissions trading scheme are considered, including the temporal and spatial dimension as well as administrative...

This paper examines the management practices of German firms with obligations under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) based on six structured in-depth interviews with managers of firms from different industries and based on survey data. The paper sheds light on management and trading...

I investigate the impact of the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) on fuel efficiency of fossil fuel power plants using administrative micro data on power plants in Germany from 2003 to 2012. I find positive efficiency effects in fuel use, leading to a decrease in fuel input of 0.4...