Using a narrative account of quarterly discretionary changes in tax liabilities from 1974Q4 to 2018Q2 in a VAR setting, we study whether legislative tax changes affect the trade balance in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. As legislative tax changes we consider (i) all changes,...

We study state-dependent effects of narratively identified tax shocks in Germany and the UK over the period 1974Q1-2018Q4 using local projections. In addition, we distinguish between aggregated and disaggregated tax types (direct and indirect taxes) as well as look for possible asymmetries...

I study the spill-over effects of legislated discretionary tax changes in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom to 11 Eurozone countries for the period 1980Q1-2018Q4 employing Local Projections (Jordà, 2005). In general, I find spillovers from US tax legislation to have the...

We study the announcement effect of legislated tax changes on GDP in the US, Germany, and the UK. Using, as the shock of interest, narratively identified information (Romer & Romer, 2009) about future tax changes at the quarter of their introduction to the legislative body, we analyse the...

If interpreted in a strict legal sense, beneficial ownership rules in tax treaties would have no effect on conduit companies because companies at law own their property and income beneficially. Conversely, a company can never own anything in a substantive sense because economically a company is...

Employment tax credit programs have been repeatedly used during economic crises, although their usefulness is empirically contestable. The objective of this paper is to quantify the tax effects of employment tax credit programs. A recent revision of the German inheritance tax law provides an...

On 30 September 2017, the United Kingdom implemented a powerful new investigative tool known as an “unexplained wealth order” in its Criminal Finances Act 2017. On 7-8 November 2017, London hosted the Fifth OECD Forum on Tax and Crime. Against this background, as well as other recent...

The traditional avoidance literature undeservedly neglects tax base distribution as a factor affecting the avoidance price, and generally assumed to be equal to the avoidance cost. In reality, avoidance providers are usually either high-skilled specialists or insiders. The strong collusion thus,...

Employment tax credit programs have been repeatedly used during economic crises, although their usefulness is empirically contestable. The objective of this paper is to quantify the tax effects of employment tax credit programs. A recent revision of the German inheritance tax law provides an...

Tax comparatists tend to bemoan the grim status of their chosen field. Complaints are aimed both at the scarcity of decent comparative legal tax scholarship, and at the lack of a theoretical foundation for the study of comparative tax law. The purpose of this Article is to portray a more...