In 2009, the Thai government implemented a price insurance scheme for rice farmers. The program, which was abandoned after only one year, added to the incomes of registered farmers a non-negative but stochastic amount that was decoupled from farmers' agricultural activities. A rich panel data...

Zusammenfassung Dummensteuern entstehen, wenn Steuerpflichtige die ihnen offenstehenden legalen Steuergestaltungsmöglichkeiten nicht optimal nutzen. Oft wird der Gesetzgeber aufgefordert, die Gefahr ihrer Entstehung durch einfachere Steuergesetze o.ä. einzudämmen. In diesem Text formalisieren...

Government-run entities are often more labor-intensive than private companies, even with identical production technologies. This need not imply slack in the public sector, but may be a rational response to its wage tax advantage over private firms. A tax-favored treatment of public production...

We study the efficiency and distributional consequences of establishing and abolishing the draft in a dynamic model with overlapping generations, taking into account endogenous human capital formation as well as government budget constraints. The introduction of the draft initially benefits the...

The EU Commission is advocating a common consolidated tax base for the corporate income tax, accompanied by a revenue sharing mechanism based on formula apportionment. We analyse tax competition in such a regime, focussing on the interaction between the definition of the tax base and the...

Social values shape policy outcomes. We examine the role of postmaterialism, a widely used concept in the social sciences, for the mix of capital and labour taxation chosen by a society. Following political scientist Inglehart, we define the degree of postmaterialism as the relative importance...

We interpret the Open Method of Coordination (OMC), recently adopted by the EU as a mode of governance in the area of social policy and other fields, as an imitative learning dynamics of the type considered in evolutionary game theory. The best-practise feature and the iterative design of the...