This paper analyses fiscal autonomy in Germany. First, it provides an overview of fiscal autonomy. What is novel in this paper compared to previous studies is the development of a fiscal autonomy coefficient for the states, based on communal data. The basic intention in the empirical part is to...

It is well known that after the First World War there was a massive flight of capital from the major European countries to foreign financial centres. It is surprising, however, to note that no historian to date has actually taken the trouble to make a detailed study of the phenomenon. The aim of...

The German law to combat VAT fraud and other tax regulations went into force recently. The German legislator aims to enforce German VAT law via a liability of platform operators (like Amazon and eBay). The consequences of this regulatory approach are a) that platform operators enforce the law...

This paper investigates firms' responses to threshold-dependent intensity of tax enforcement. We use administrative tax return data over the entire population of German firms and exploit industry variation in firm size thresholds applied by the tax administration. In our setting, each threshold...

In the European Union Member States, value-added tax (VAT) is undergoing a continuous process of harmonization, which was initiated in the 1960s by the introduction of the First and Second Council Directives and which resulted in the implementation of the common tax assessment base. Currently,...

This paper analyses fiscal autonomy in Germany. First, it provides an overview of fiscal autonomy. What is novel in this paper compared to previous studies is the development of a fiscal autonomy coefficient for the states, based on communal data. The basic intention in the empirical part is to...

Tax fraud is a serious problem for fiscal authorities worldwide, not only in countries regarded as "hightax" like Germany. Besides longterm tax reforms, tax amnesties are used to bring back taxable amounts into the legal sector. The German tax amnesty of 2004/2005 was one of the last examples in...

The paper analyses the relationship of tax compliance costs and business strategy. Due to instruments, like information technology, simplified cash accounting or outsourcing compliance activities to tax advisers, private businesses have a set of strategies to optimize their tax compliance cost...

Häufig erfahren die Bürger wenig über den Nutzen öffentlicher Güter im Vergleich zum Steueropfer, das sie dafür aufbringen müssen: Gegenüber öffentlichen Gütern besteht keine Konsumentensouveränität. Als Ersatz dafür könnte wenigstens eine Wählersouveränität bei öffentlichen...

This paper studies the role of beliefs about own performance or appearance for compliance at the customs. In an experiment in which underreporting has a higher expected payoff than truthful reporting we find: a large share, about 15-20 percent of the subjects, is more compliant if they have...