In recent years, CO2 emissions have become the leading basis of assessment for car taxes in most European countries. In July 2009, with a view to pursuing climate policy goals, also Germany began using this factor to assess taxation on cars. The DIW Berlin has carried out a systematic and quantitative comparison of car taxation in Europe.1 The results reveal high tax rates in over ten countries that ...
Shifting taxes from labor income to consumption is regularly suggested as a measure to induce work incentives. We investigate the effect of increases in the Value Added Tax on labor supply and the income distribution in Germany, which is compensated by a revenue-neutral reduction in income-related taxes. Based on a dual data base and a microsimulation model of labor supply behavior, we confirm a general ...
This study uses a switching regression framework with known sample separation to analyze the effects of corporate income taxation on investment in case of binding and non-binding financial constraints. By employing two different sample splitting criteria, payout behavior and the ratio of liabilities to total assets, I show that the elasticity of capital to its user costs in an auto-distributed-lag ...
How can public pension systems be reformed to ensure fiscal stability in the face of increasing life expectancy? To address this pressing open question in public finance, we estimate a life-cycle model in which the optimal employment, retirement and consumption decisions of forward-looking individuals depend, inter alia, on life expectancy and the design of the public pension system. We calculate that, ...
Empirical analyses on the determinants of life satisfaction often include the impact of the number of children variable among controls without fully discriminating between its two (socio-relational and pecuniary) components. In our empirical analysis on the German Socioeconomic Panel we show that, when introducing household income without correction for the number of members, the pecuniary effect prevails ...
The German Child Benefit ("Kindergeld") is paid to legal guardians of children as a cash benefit. This study employs exogenous variations in the amount of child benefit received by households to investigate the extent to which these various changes have translated into an improvement in the circumstances of children related to their well-being. I use the German Socio-Economic Panel to estimate the ...