This paper analyses some fiscal aspects of mortgage debt in the EU. It first describes the main fiscal instruments that governments use to affect mortgage-financed home-ownership. In the empirical part, real mortgage debt growth is analysed for 15 EU countries using pooled regressions. Fiscal...

Mit den im März 2015 bekanntgewordenen Eckpunkten zur Änderung des Erbschaft- und Schenkungssteuergesetzes wird die erbschaftsteuerliche Verschonung von Betriebsvermögen erheblich erschwert. Dies gilt insbesondere für mittelgroße und große Familienunternehmen. Der Grund dafür ist die...

Mit dem am 1. Juni 2015 vom Bundesfinanzministerium vorgelegten Referentenentwurf zur Änderung des Erbschaft- und Schenkungssteuergesetzes wird die erbschaftsteuerliche Verschonung von Betriebsvermögen erheblich erschwert. Dies gilt insbesondere für mittelgroße und große...

The 2008 financial crisis is the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1929. It has been characterised by a housing bubble in a context of rapid credit expansion, high risk-taking and exacerbated financial leverage, leading to deleveraging and credit crunch when the bubble burst....

This paper studies regional output asymmetries following U.S. federal tax shocks. We estimate a vector autoregressive model for each U.S. state, utilizing the exogenous tax shock series recently proposed by Romer and Romer (2010) and find considerable variations: estimated output multipliers lie...

Company taxes and taxes on highly skilled labour both influence the attractiveness of a particular region as a location for investment. We measure the effective tax burden on capital investment and on highly qualified labour in 33 locations across Europe and the United States. We then correlate...

This paper presents an applied general equilibrium model for Germany. The model integrates specific labour market institutions in an otherwise standard general equilibrium framework. There are sectoral wage negotiations for two skill types of workers between firms and trade unions. The...

With the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2008, European governments extensively intervened to avert a severe economic recession. Taxation is a crucial instrument to achieve such economic objectives, but it also represents a redistributive tool in democratic societies. Generally, left-wing...

Against the background of a notoriously high macroeconomic instability and the need to raise tax revenues to meet the demands of public spending, this paper analyzes the tradeoff between growth and volatility of tax revenues in Latin America. We use a two-step Engle-Granger-type model to...

This paper identifies tax policy that both speeds recovery from the current economic crisis and contributes to long-run growth. This is a challenge because short-term recovery requires increases in demand while long-term growth requires increases in supply. As short-term tax concessions can be...