Social incentives like employee awards are widespread in the corporate sector and may be important instruments for solving agency problems. To date, we have little understanding of their effect on behavior. Unique panel data from the call center of a Fortune 500 financial services provider allow...

This paper reports the results from a large-scale laboratory experiment investigating the impact of tournament incentives and wage gifts on creativity. We find that tournaments substantially increase creative output, with no evidence for crowding out of intrinsic motivation. By comparison, wage...

We manipulate workers’ perceived meaning of a job in a field experiment. Half of the workers are informed that their job is important, the other half are told that their job is of no relevance. Results show that workers exert more effort when meaning is high, corroborating previous findings on...

Economic theory suggests that performance pay may serve as an effective screening device to attract productive agents. The existing evidence on the self-selection of agents is largely limited to job tasks where performance is driven by routine, well-defined procedures. This study presents...

In this study we use import penetration as a proxy for foreign competition in order to empirically analyze (1) the impact of foreign competition on managerial compensation, (2) differences in the impact between Germany and the U.S. and (3) whether the impact of import penetration is driven by...

This paper studies the effects of political factors, mainly partisanship, on corporate taxes in the past 30 years – a period of intensifying competitive pressure in Europe. Extending the Zodrow-Mieszkowski model by decision-makers who have ideological preferences yields the hypothesis that...

The German corporate tax reform of 2008 has brought about important cuts in corporate tax rates, which were at the same time accompanied by significant changes in the determination of the tax base for both major German corporate taxes - corporate income tax and trade tax. The reform followed the...

Der Beitrag berechnet die Aufkommensausfälle verschiedener Gestaltungsmodelle für eine steuerliche Forschungsförderung in Deutschland auf Basis eines Mikrosimulationsmodells. Die fiskalischen Kosten betragen zwischen 464 Mio. € und 5.701 Mio. €. Eine Erstattungsoption der Steuergutschrift...

Dieser Beitrag untersucht umfassend die Unternehmensbesteuerung in der Europäischen Union im Zeitraum von 1998 bis 2007. Das innereuropäische Steuergefälle wird unter Rückgriff auf zwei zentrale Maßgrößen ‐ die Kapitalkosten und die effektive Durchschnittssteuerbelastung ‐ abgebildet....

We use a unique matched tax return-financial statement data set to examine the magnitude and sources of book-tax differences in Germany. For the first time, the data set enables us to evaluate the extent to which financial and tax accounting differ in Germany in the most accurate manner. Despite...