We empirically derive the welfare effects of a shift from joint to individual taxation of married households in Germany. For the welfare evaluation we estimate the preference heterogeneity and use normative welfare concepts proposed by Fleurbaey (2006) to address the difficulties of comparison...

Andreoni (1993) has shown in an experimental study that crowding out is incomplete when an involuntary lump-sum tax is levied exogenously on individuals to finance the provision of a public good. In this paper, we (i) replicate Andreoni's experimental conditions, and (ii) introduce treatments...

This paper considers a positive model of income redistribution with mobile individuals in a federal system. The politician of a jurisdiction makes redistributive policy to maximize political support from poor welfare recipients and rich taxpayers. If only the poor move, a politician...

All over the world, recent legislative reforms share the goal of increasing fiscal autonomy of lower tiers of governments. The aim of this policy is to reduce vertical fiscal imbalance (VFI) and enhance the efficiency in the provision of public services, via increased accountability of local...

This paper reviews and extends recent attempts to better understand fiscal policy decision-making. Surveys of politicians are complementary to traditional empirical analyses and can be used to extract beliefs of policymakers. There is much heterogeneity across and also within parties. Often...

We follow Wellisch (1994) in examining the efficiency of regional policymaking in a model with interregional spillovers and in which individuals are attached to regions for cultural reasons. In addition, we assume that regions desire to maintain their social cohesion. We postulate that regional...

Surprisingly little is known about voters´ public debt preferences on a micro level. This is deplorable, given the importance of the fiscal stability culture in the context of the European public debt crisis. This contribution tests, for a self-designed representative German survey, debt...

Many policy reforms are introduced with a significant lag between the time of legislative passage and their actual implementation. This is also the case for a new constitutional rule in Germany, referred to as a debt brake (Schuldenbremse), which requires the federal and state governments to run...

The dual income tax combines a progressive tax schedule for labor income with a low flat tax rate on capital income and corporate income. This paper restates the case for the dual income tax and discusses alternative methods of taxing business income under such a tax system, paying special...

The effects of personal income tax changes are usually analyzed by comparing the inequality of income distributions before and after the tax policy change on a fixed pretax income distribution. This constant-population methodology aims at isolating the "pure" redistributive effect of the tax...