We study the disclosure decision and price-setting behavior of competing firms in the presence of cursed consumers, who fail to be sufficiently skeptical about a firm's quality upon observing non-disclosure of quality-relevant information. We show that neither competition nor the presence of...

Corporate tax levels have fallen substantially in Europe during the last decades. There is a broad literature on tax competition which has been identified as one reason for the decline in corporate tax levels. However, none of these studies explicitly ask the question whether tax competition...

This paper provides empirical evidence for tax mimicking among unicipalities by exploiting a quasi-experiment in the German local fiscal equalization scheme. We show for the metropolitan area FrankfurtRheinMain that, besides neighborhood, the degree of economic integration of municipalities...

In this paper, we assess the impact of major German structural reforms from 1999 to 2008 on key macroeconomic variables within a two-country monetary union DSGE model. By many, these reforms, especially the Hartz reforms on the labor market, are considered to be the root of thereafter observed...

This paper uses the quasi-experiment of Germany's 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...

We study optimal nonlinear taxation of labor income and linear taxation of capital income in a life-cycle framework with private information and idiosyncratic risk. We focus on simple history-independent tax instruments. We first analyze the welfare losses from this simplification as compared to...

The German Accounting Law Modernization Act (BilMoG) represents a change in paradigm with regard to the traditionally close relationship between financial and tax accounting in Germany. At the same time, requirements on the disclosure of deferred taxes were revised considerably. We make use of...

This study evaluates the tax planning behavior of married couples with regard to the allocation of tax schedules between spouses in the context of the German income tax splitting. The focus lies on the disparities between East and West German couples. The assumption is that the tax planning...

The paper revisits the debate on trickle-down growth in view of the widely discussed evolution of the earnings and income distribution that followed a massive expansion of higher education. We propose a dynamic general equilibrium model to dynamically evaluate whether economic growth triggered...

The individual's perception of transport cost usually does not include the full social cost of transport, as in for instance, its global environmental effects. Under this view, we observe a mismatch between individual perception and general social transport cost and welfare. In order to overcome...