Nachdem die Länder Ende 2015 einen Vorschlag zur Neuregelung des Länderfinanzausgleichs emacht hatten, gelang im Oktober 2016 eine Einigung zwischen Bund und Ländern. Der Umsatzsteuervorwegausgleich und der Länderfinanzausgleich (i.e.S.) werden bgeschafft, stattdessen werden der...

The mobility of the tax base may influence fiscal outcomes. The many theoretical contributions about the role of mobility are not matched by empirical evidence. Existing studies address strategic interaction between governments, but have little to say about mobility. We introduce a new measure...

This paper studies how changes in welfare benefit levels affect welfare recipients' residential choices. Although several empirical studies have stressed that welfare policy may affect residential choices of welfare recipients, few studies have simultaneously taken into account that residential...

We develop a simple model which determines the optimal timing of school tracking as the outcome of the trade off between the advantages of specialization, which call for early tracking, and the costs of early selection, which lead to later tracking. We calibrate the model for Germany and study...

Tax competition for a mobile factor is different in 'new economic geography settings' compared to standard tax competition models. The agglomeration rent which accrues to the mobile factor in the core region can be taxed. Moreover, a tax differential between the core and the periphery can be...

Motivated by anecdotal as well as econometric evidence from Italy, we ask whether private schools can provide lower quality than public schools. Using a stylized model of the education market with sequential entry of a public and a private school, we show that, depending on the underlying...

Governments do not have perfect information regarding the priorities and the needs of different groups in the economy. This lack of knowledge opens the door for different groups to lobby the government in order to receive the government?s support. We set up a model of hierarchical contests and...

We investigate the relationship between income tax rate variation and internal migration for the unique case of Switzerland, whose system of determining tax rates primarily at the community level results in enough variation to permit analysis of their influence on migration. Specifically, using...

Economists are often skeptical concerning the economic effects of various forms of human rights: it has been argued that basic human rights can make the legal system less efficient but also that extensive social rights are incompatible with market economies. It is argued here that basic human...

This paper assesses the impact of corporate taxation on multinational activity. A numerically solvable general equilibrium model of trade and multinational firms is used to incorporate the following components of corporate taxation: parent and host country statutory corporate tax rates,...