In der Debatte über die Neuordnung der Einkommensbesteuerung in Deutschland gilt die Steuervereinfachung als eines der zentralen Reformziele. Das liegt nicht nur daran, dass das bestehende komplizierte System den Steuerpflichtigen und den Finanzbehörden hohe Verwaltungskosten aufbürdet. Die...

In der Debatte über eine Reform des deutschen Einkommensteuersystems wird immer wieder die Einführung einer Flat Rate Tax gefordert. Üblicherweise bestehen solche Vorschläge aus den Elementen Verbreiterung der Bemessungsgrundlage, Erhöhung des Grundfreibetrags und Einführung eines (relativ...

Rising income inequalities are widely debated in public and academic discourse. In this paper, we contribute to this debate by proposing a new family of measures of unfair inequality. To do so, we acknowledge that inequality is not bad per se, but that its underlying sources need to be taken...

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 flat income tax has become increasingly popular recently, yet its implementation is limited to Eastern Europe. We analyse the distributional and efficiency effects of flat tax scenarios for Western European countries. Our simulations show that flat tax rates required to attain revenue...

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 persons' income and therefore allow for a more sophisticated analysis of richness. We demonstrate the application of these new measures to...

There is clear evidence that fairness plays a role in redistribution. Individuals want to compensate others for their misfortune, while they allow them to enjoy the fruits of their effort. Such fairness considerations have been introduced in political economy and optimal income tax models with a...

Are the United States still a land of opportunity? We provide new insights on this question by invoking a novel measurement approach that allows us to target the joint distribution of income and wealth. We show that inequality of opportunity has increased by 77% over the time period 1983-2016....

Previous estimates of unfair inequality of opportunity (IOp) are only lower bounds because of the unobservability of the full set of endowed circumstances beyond the sphere of individual responsibility. In this paper, we suggest a new estimator based on a fixed effects panel model which...