The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political...

We exploit an exhaustive administrative dataset that includes the individual tax returns of all households in the top percentile of the income distribution in Germany to pin down the effective income taxation of households with very high incomes. Taking tax base erosion into account, we find...

This paper provides formulas for optimal top marginal tax rates when couples are taxed according to income splitting between spouses, consumption is taxed, and the skill distribution is unbounded. Optimal top marginal income tax rates are computed for Germany using a dataset that includes the...

This paper documents methodology underlying the construction of the integrated data base for our study on 'Wer trägt die Steuerlast in Deutschland? - Verteilungswirkungen des deutschen Steuer- und Transfersystems' (Who bears the tax burden in Germany? - Distributional Analyses of the German tax...