This paper investigates the effects of government spending on key macroeconomic variables in Germany. It contributes to the ongoing debate on how to properly identify exogenous fiscal shocks in the data and on whether or not the government should intervene in the business cycle. Following Ramey...

We estimate the corporate elasticity of taxable income. Our analysis draws on panel variation in the decentralized system of corporate taxation in Switzerland. We find that an increase in a jurisdiction's corporate net-of-tax rate by 1% results in an increase in aggregate corporate income by...

We use novel transaction-level card expenditure data to estimate the effect of the temporary value-added tax (VAT) cut in Germany 2020. We find that the annualized growth rate of expenditures for durables increased by 6 percentage points (pp) during the tax cut, with a particularly strong...

We use novel transaction-level card expenditure data to estimate the effect of the temporary value-added tax (VAT) cut in Germany 2020. We find that the annualized growth rate of expenditures for durables increased by 6 percentage points (pp) during the tax cut, with a particularly strong...

Key parameters for the modeling of public finances are tax revenue elasticities with respect to tax bases. Yet the existing studies estimating these elasticities for emerging countries disregard the effects of tax reforms on tax revenue, which renders their estimates inconsistent. We use a...

In this paper, first, six micro (4) and macro (2) estimation approaches are briefly described; they are the National Accounts Statistics discrepancy method and two new micro survey methods, a third one using a combination of company manager surveys and their knowledge to calibrate the size of the...

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...

In this paper, first, the MIMIC estimation method is described and criticized and due to a double counting problem a correction is suggested. Second, the measurement methods used for National Accounts Statistics - the discrepancy method and two new micro survey methods - are described and a...

In this paper, first, the MIMIC estimation method is described and criticized and due to a double counting problem a correction is suggested. Second, the measurement methods used for National Accounts Statistics - the discrepancy method and two new micro survey methods - are described and a...