Not enough is known about the responsiveness of individuals, in particular those who tend to work under different incentives, to changes in marginal tax rates. We ask whether changes in marginal tax rates are less distortionary for workers engaged in a contest. To examine this potential...

We study the effects of a large car scrappage scheme in Germany on new car purchases and local air quality by combining vehicle registration data with data on local air pollutant emissions. For identification we exploit cross-sectional variation across districts in the number of cars eligible...

This paper examines the application of quasi-experimental methods in environmental economics. We begin with two observations: i) standard quasi-experimental methods, first applied in other microeconomic fields, typically assume unit-level treatments that do not spill over across units; (ii)...

This paper provides a demographic outlook of the Euro-Mediterranean region and then shows the economic and fiscal consequences of such demographic differences within a two-region model with international labor mobility. International labor mobility is also examined through an externalities...

The success of the flat rate tax in Eastern Europe suggests that this concept could also be amodel for the welfare states of Western Europe. The present paper uses a simulation modelto analyse the effects of revenue neutral flat rate tax reforms on equity and efficiency for thecase of Germany...

Several countries have recently abolished or significantly reduced their taxes on bequests.Bequest taxes, on the other hand, were among the first to be introduced when modernsystems of taxation were developed at the end of the nineteenth century. We propose anexplanation for these facts which is...

As more and more Venezuelans leave their country, fleeing the economic and social crisis, the number of Venezuelans in Brazil has risen steadily since 2016, constituting about 18.6 percent of Brazil's 1.4 million refugee and migrant population as of October 2020. Past research finds that the...

The alcohol industry argues that alcohol excise taxes do not reduce heavy drinking because of substitutions to lower-cost products and that these taxes disproportionately burden low-income drinkers. Alternatively, some economists have argued that increases in alcohol excise taxes reduce heavy...

We document contemporaneous differences in the aggregate labor supply of married couples across 17 European countries and the US. Based on a model of joint household decision making, we quantify the contribution of international differences in non-linear labor income taxes and consumption taxes...

Welfare programs are important for reducing poverty but create incentives for recipients to maximize their income by either reducing labor supply or manipulating taxable income. In this paper, we quantify the extent of such behavioral responses for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in the US....