Data from official statistics and tax laws are exploited to describe fifty years of income taxation in Germany, with a focus on its role as a fiscal and distributive tool. The temporal pattern that emerges from the data is one of a golden age of the German income tax, followed by a slow shift...

Since objective news coverage is vital to democracy, captured media can seriously distort collective decisions. The current paper develops a voting model where citizens are uncertain about the welfare effects induced by alternative policy options and derive information about those effects from...