The book offers a comprehensive treatment of tax theory and policy. It surveys the German tax system, portrays tax history, and describes principles of tax administration and the construction of schedules. Tax shifting, optimal taxation theory, and questions of tax justice are considered in...

We develop a model of optimal carbon taxation and redistribution taking into account horizontal equity concerns by considering heterogeneous energy efficiencies. By deriving first- and secondbest rules for policy instruments including carbon taxes, transfers and energy subsidies, we then...

The ability-to-pay approach assesses taxes paid as a sacrifice by the taxpayers. This raises the question of how to define and how to measure it: in absolute, relative, or marginal terms? U.S. respondents prefer a tax schedule that is either a pure (absolute) Equal Sacrifice or a mixture of...

We reassess the empirical effect of income and employment on self-reported well-being. Our analysis makes use of a novel two-step estimation procedure that allows applying instrumental variable regressions with ordinal observable data. As suggested by the theory of incomplete markets, we...

We reassess the empirical effects of income and employment on self-reported well-being. Our analysis makes use of a two-step estimation procedure that allows applying instrumental variable regressions with ordinal observable data. As suggested by the theory of incomplete markets, we...

In 2005 the German government implemented the so-called Hartz IV reform, which amounted to a complete overhaul of the German unemployment insurance system and resulted in a significant reduction in unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. In this paper, we use an incomplete-market...

In 2005 the German government implemented the so-called Hartz IV reform, which amounted to a complete overhaul of the German unemployment insurance system and resulted in a significant reduction in unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed. In this paper, we use an incomplete-market...

This paper studies the effect of two labor market institutions, unemployment insurance (UI) and job search assistance (JSA), on the output cost and welfare cost of recessions. The paper develops a tractable incomplete-market model with search unemployment, skill depreciation during unemployment,...

This paper studies the effect of two labor market institutions, unemployment insurance (UI) and job search assistance (JSA), on the output cost and welfare cost of recessions. The paper develops a tractable incomplete-market model with search unemployment, skill depreciation during unemployment,...

In this paper, we empirically assess the causal relationship between trade and individual income risk and study the role that human capital plays in this relationship using a rich, worker-level, longitudinal data set from Germany spanning from 1976 to 2012. Our estimates suggest substantial...