"Learning Dynamics in Tax Bunching at the Kink: Evidence from Ecuador", Albrecht Bohne and Jan Sebastian Nimczik

While effective bureaucracy is crucial for state capacity, its decision-making remains a black box. We elicit preferences of 900+ real-world public procurement officials in Finland and Germany. This is an important pursuit as they report having sizeable discretion and minimal extrinsic...

This paper explores the connection between the proliferation of cashless, or e-money, payments and value-added tax (VAT) compliance. We present both visual and descriptive evidence that illustrates a negative correlation between e-money use and VAT evasion, proxied by the VAT compliance gap for...

Der Bundeshaushalt hat im Jahr 2023 mit 20,0 Prozent jeden fünften Euro für Zukunftsausgaben eingesetzt. Die Zukunftsausrichtung des Bundeshaushalts war zuvor in der Pandemie auf einen Wert von nur 18,2 Prozent abgesackt, hat sich seitdem jedoch wieder erholt. Zum Anstieg der Zukunftsausgaben...

Limited attention may play a role in explaining the inability to reach savings goals (Karlan, McConnell, Mullainathan and Zinman, forthcoming). Presuming that attention is a scarce resource and important for the pursuit of saving plans, limits to attention in inter-temporal consumption and...

The presentation analyzes whether the success of persuasive messages depends on an individual's behavioral bias: If at the onset of a savings period saving goals are chosen with over- or underconfidence, i.e. individuals over- or underestimate their savings potential, individuals might save too...

In this paper we investigate behavioral constraints to savings among smallholder farmers in rural Ethiopia. Increasing savings by overcoming such behavioral constraints has been documented to have positive effects on various outcomes such as health, education, and agricultural investments. We...

A well-functioning bureaucracy is a precondition for efficient public goods provision. However, bureaucratic decision-making is still largely seen as a black box. We provide novel insights into the preferences of bureaucrats regarding their work outcomes. We focus on a major public sector...

A well-functioning bureaucracy is a precondition for efficient public goods provision. However, bureaucratic decision-making is still largely seen as a black box. We provide novel insights into the preferences of bureaucrats regarding their work outcomes. We focus on a major public sector...

Der Bundeshaushalt muss Zukunftsinvestitionen stärker priorisieren. Darüber besteht in der Theorie ein weit reichender Konsens. In der haushaltspolitischen Praxis ist es hingegen schwierig, dieses Ziel durchzusetzen. Ausgaben mit einem unmittelbaren Gegenwartsnutzen erfahren regelmäßig hohen...