This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Pareto-improving tax reforms. The conditions can be expressed as sufficient statistics and have a wide range of potential applications in public finance. We discuss one such application in detail: the introduction of...

This paper studies the tax treatment of couples. We develop two different ap-proaches. One is tailored to the analysis of tax systems that stick to the principle that the tax base for couples is the sum of their incomes. One is tailored to the analysis of reforms toward individual taxation. We...

A uniform price for carbon is at the center of market-based approaches to climate policy. Actual climate policy, by contrast, has many sector-specific rules. This paper studies the desirability of the market-based approach using tools from the theory of taxation. It is found that a justification...

We develop a model of political competition with endogenous turnout and endogenous platforms. Parties trade off incentivizing their supporters to vote and discouraging the supporters of the competing party from voting. We show that the latter objective is particularly pronounced for a party with...

The growing dissatisfaction with perceived distributional inequality and budgetary constraints gave rise to a discussion on the (re-)introduction of wealth taxes. Wealth taxes are typically levied on private wealth, in some countries also on corporate wealth. To avoid misleading statements...

The Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) recently proposed an interest barrier to fight tax base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS). We use the introduction of such an interest deductibility restriction in Germany as a quasi-experiment and find significant corporate...

We investigate how tax loss offset restrictions affect an investor's evaluation of risky investments under bounded rationality. We analytically identify behavioral tax effects for different levels of loss offset restrictions, tax rate and prospect theoretical biases (loss aversion, probability...

Credence goods markets - like for health care or repair services - with their informational asymmetries between sellers and customers are prone to fraudulent behavior of sellers and resulting market inefficiencies. We present the first model that considers both diagnostic uncertainty of sellers...

Credence goods markets are prone to fraudulent behavior and market inefficiencies due to informational asymmetries between sellers and customers. We examine experimentally the effects of diagnostic uncertainty and insurance coverage on the information acquisition and provision decisions by...

In markets for credence goods - such as health care or repair services - fraudulent behavior by better informed experts is a common problem. Our model studies how four common features shape experts' provision behavior in credence goods markets: (i) diagnostic uncertainty of experts; (ii)...