Recent years have seen an unprecedented increase in the provision of R&D tax incentives. A growing empirical literature suggests that R&D tax incentives are instrumental in raising domestic R&D activity. In policy debates this finding is often interpreted to lend support to the notion that R&D...

One explanation for the poor performance of regulation in the recent financial crisis is that regulators had been captured by the financial sector. We present a micro-founded model with rational agents in which banks may capture regulators due to their high degree of sophistication. Banks can...

Why do some economic systems depend on bank financing while others rely on capital markets and bond financing? We propose a political economy model in which elites favor a bank-based system, which increases their rents due to reduced competition. If suffrage is restricted to the elite, this will...

On February 12, 2010, SUERF, the Oesterreichische Nationalbank and the Bankwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft continued their established tradition of jointly organised conferences. As evidenced also by the 115 conference participants, this year's subject of "Contagion and Spillovers – New...

Motivated by the observation that access to evasion opportunities is distributed heterogeneously across the labor market, this paper examines the extent to which labor supply elasticities with respect to tax rates depend on such evasion opportunities. We first discuss the channels through which...

This paper analyzes the effect of the introduction of a final withholding tax on capital income on the progression of the German income tax. As previous literature shows, even with synthetic income taxation, tax progression was strongest in the middle of the income distribution, and decreased...

We apply recently proposed individual welfare measures in the context of preference heterogeneity, derived from structural labour supply models. Contrary to the standard practice of using reference preferences and wages, these measures preserve preference heterogeneity in the normative step of...