German history over the past 125 years has been turbulent. Marked by two world wars, revolutions and major regime changes, as well as a hyperinflation and three currency reforms, expropriations and territorial divisions, it comprises extreme shocks to study the role of historical events,...

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political...

The idea of higher wealth taxes to finance the mounting public debt in the wake of the financial crises is gaining ground in several OECD countries. We evaluate the revenue and distributional effects of a one-time capital levy on personal net wealth that is currently on the German political...

This paper uses the quasi-experiment of Germanyś reunification to identify local tax mimicking by municipalities in Eastern-Germany. After reunification, East-German municipalities were allowed to independently set, for the first time in decades, local business and property tax rates. I explore...

An alternative minimum tax (AMT) is often regarded as desirable. We analyze a wealth tax at corporate and personal level that is designed as an AMT as proposed by the German Green Party. This wealth tax is imputable to profit taxes and is hence intended to prevent multiple (multistage) taxation....

German municipalities have substantial autonomy in setting taxes on two distinct tax bases: business profits and property values. We use this setting and a two-step approach to explore whether implemented tax policy is consistent with the seminal inverse-elasticity rule. First, we estimate the...

Contrary to frequent recommendations of the public finance literature and international institutions, a persistently high tax wedge on labor is observed in Europe. At the same time, the scope for shifting taxes from labor to more growth-friendly revenue sources appears underused in many European...

This paper uses recent data for single-family home purchases to study the effects of the German real estate transfer tax. We aim to separate the tax’s short-term anticipatory effects from its long-term effects on real estate transactions. The data indicate that an increase in the transfer tax...

Since the 1990ies several countries abolished the wealth tax, but surprisingly few scholars investigated the effects empirically. Motivated by the theoretical literature, this study estimates the effect of the abolition of the net wealth tax in Germany in 1997 on the household saving rate. The...