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...

Mircrosimulation models (MSM) and Computable General Equilibrium models (CGE) have both been widely used in policy analysis. The combination of these two model types allows the utilisation of the advantages of both types. The aim of this paper is to describe the state-of-the-art in simulation...

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...

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians ́outside earnings. We propose a simple theoretical model with politicians facing a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The model has a testable...

When comparing tax benefit systems across Europe, Germany is usually regarded as a country with a high level of taxes and contributions which is often seen as a main challenge for the economic performance of the welfare state. In this paper, we analyse the progressivity and redistribution...

In this paper, we define a new class of richness measures. In contrast to the often used headcount, these new measures are sensitive to changes in rich person's income and therefore allow for a more sophisticated analysis of richness. We demonstrate the application of these new measures to...

The German experience of the crisis was very different compared to those of most other countries in Europe. Germany was hit by a very strong shock which was relatively concentrated in the exporting, manufacturing industries. In addition, the German labour market was very resilient during the...

It is widely believed that globalization affects the extent of employment and wage responses to economic shocks. To provide evidence for this, we analyze the effect of firms' exporting behavior on the elasticity of labor demand. Using rich, German administrative linked employer-employee panel...

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...