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...

The article advances the hypothesis that Germany is unable to increase its gains from trade dispite increasing trading volumes. High and rigid German wages largely result from the minimum wage constraint imposed by a welfare state that offers generous replacement incomes. Confronted by low-wage...

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...