In vielen Ländern hat die Reaktion auf die Covid-Pandemie tiefe Löcher in die staatlichen Kassen gerissen. Die deutsche Politik diskutiert deshalb über eine einmalige Vermögensabgabe zur Senkung der Schuldenquote. Der Wissenschaftliche Beirat beim Bundesministerium der Finanzen (2021) hat...

What is the status quo of fairness in Europe? To answer this question, we have calculated multidimensional equality of opportunity in income, education, and health for 29 European countries in 2019. Our results show that inequalities of opportunity in education and health are lower than in...

We survey samples of German firms and households to document novel stylized facts about the extent of information frictions among the two groups. First, firms' expectations about macroeconomic variables are closer to expert forecasts and less dispersed than households', consistent with higher...

This paper deals with the impact of electoral competition on politicians' outside earnings. In our framework, politicians face a tradeoff between allocating their time to political effort or to an alternative use generating outside earnings. The main hypothesis is that the amount of time spent...

European countries have the world's most redistributive tax and transfer systems. While they have been well equipped to deal with vertical inequality - that is, fostering redistribution from the rich to the poor - less is known about their performance in dealing with horizontal inequality, that...

In this paper, we present a dynamic scoring analysis of tax reforms for European countries. In this analysis we account for the feedback effects resulting from the adjustment in the labour market and for the economy-wide reaction to tax policy changes. We combine the microsimulation model...

This paper describes the ifo Tax and Transfer Behavioral Microsimulation Model (ifoMSM-TTL), a policy microsimulation model for Germany. The model uses household microdata from the German Socio-Economic Panel and firm data from the German Linked Employer-Employee Dataset. This microsimulation...

This study uses scenario calculations to estimate the economic costs of the partial closure of the economy due to the coronavirus epidemic. With a shutdown duration of two months, the costs reach between EUR 255 billion and EUR 495 billion, depending on the scenario, and reduce the annual growth...