I investigate how political uncertainty influences corporate investment decisions employing a unique panel dataset of German manufacturing firms. I use data on firms' self-reported investment realizations, plans and revisions. The firm-specific user cost of capital captures the current...

This dissertation consists of six self-contained chapters that are related to the behavior of firms and politicians in a broader sense. After an introduction to the topic, the first part of the dissertation elaborates on how institutional and political framework conditions influence the behavior...

This paper investigates - in a large heterogeneous sample - the relationship between social preferences on the one hand, and socioeconomic factors and political preferences on the other hand. Socioeconomic factors correlate with social preferences, and social preferences robustly shape political...

We develop a simple model which determines the optimal timing of school tracking as the outcome of the trade off between the advantages of specialization, which call for early tracking, and the costs of early selection, which lead to later tracking. We calibrate the model for Germany and study...

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...

The paper evaluates the working of German CFC rules that restrict the use of foreign subsidiaries located in low-tax countries to shelter passive investment income from home taxation. While passive investments make up a significant fraction of German outbound FDI, we find that German CFC rules...

This paper argues that profit-shifting activities of multi-jurisdictional enterprises (MJE) are maintained under a tax system of consolidation and formula apportionment (FA). A theoretical model discusses how an MJE can exploit its impact on the definition of the consolidated group...

Dieser Beitrag untersucht die Wirkungen der Zinsbereinigung des Eigenkapitals auf das zu erwartende Steueraufkommen und auf den internationalen Steuerwettbewerb. Ausgangspunkt hierfür ist eine modelltheoreti-sche Untersuchung des Zusammenhanges zwischen Kapitalmarktrenditen und...

In this study, we estimate the impacts of differences in international tax rates on the probability of choosing a location for an affiliate of a multinational firm. In particular, we distinguish between the tax sensitivity of Greenfield and M&A investments. Based on a novel firm-level dataset on...

Using the German local business tax as a testing ground, we empirically investigate the impact of firm agglomeration on municipal tax setting behavior. The analysis exploits a rich data source on the population of German firms to construct detailed measures for the communities' agglomeration...