The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

During the last two decades the so called IT revolution has led to a diverse pattern of growth and employment in OECD countries. In particular, anglo-saxon economies like the U.S. or the U.K. exhibited high rates of economic performance and low unemployment rates, whereas continental European...

Due to increased technological change which lead to an increased demand for skilled workers, it becomes more and more difficult for low skilled workers to find a job. How should a society or political decision makers react? Recently, German politicians are engaged in a discussion about the...

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...

The theoretical literature suggests that when taking tax effects into account, debt ought to be preferable to equity. However, there are no uniform predictions of the size of this tax benefit (tax shield) in comparison to an opposing increasing cost of debt (especially insolvency costs). The...

With the tax reform 2000 Germany has seen the implementation of the most ambitious tax reduction programme in its post-war history. In the period from 1998 to 2005, taxpayers will benefit substantially from net tax relief more than DM 100 billions in total. It is expected, that private...