A gradually introduced reform of local government accounting made it temporarily possible for municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to avoid the effective control of their budget by the authorities in charge of overseeing local government budgets and enforcing the existing...

A gradually introduced reform of local government accounting made it temporarily possible for municipalities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia to avoid the effective control of their budget by the authorities in charge of overseeing local government budgets and enforcing the existing...

Regional productivity differences provide scope for productivity-enhancing labor mobility. Redistribution reduces relocation incentives through higher taxes or lower transfers. Combining an intensive labor supply margin with an extensive, productivity-enhancing migration margin, we determine how...

We consider the hold-up problem between a foreign direct investor and the government(s) in a host country with weak governmental structure and lack of power to commit. Using Nash threats, we show that an efficient investment level can be sustained for a sufficiently high discount factor and ask...

Restrictions on work hours are more important in countries with a large welfare state. We show that this empirical observation is consistent with the strategic effects of such restrictions in a welfare state in the context of optimal direct taxation in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971). Our...

If a public project is financed through private contributions with convex costs, project completion may be delayed. The paper examines how asymmetries, the order of moves, and the absence of commitment will affect the completion time. All three factors are shown to cause delay, although for...

We study the pass-through of indirect taxes on beer prices in the European Union (EU). Exploiting the variation of value added tax rates, beer excise tax rates, and beer prices in a panel of monthly data from 1996 to 2016 of all current 28 EU member states, we estimate the tax pass-through of...

Das Projekt analysiert die Preiswirkungen der Mehrwertsteuersenkung im Juli 2020 sowie die der entsprechenden Anhebung im Januar 2021 im Rahmen des Konjunkturpakets der Bundesregierung im Zuge der Corona-Pandemie. Die Untersuchung basiert auf Scannerdaten der GfK, die Informationen über die...