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Income inequality in Germany has been continuously increasing during the past 20 years. In general, this is understood as an increase in inequality of wages due to changes in bargaining power of employees. However, the role of changing household structure is widely neglected. Societal trends like a decline in birth rate and an increase in the risk of divorce affect per capita incomes, which has repercussions for the income distribution even if wages remain constant. The aim of this paper is to quantify the proportion of changing household structures in the increase in inequality. We find that the rise in inequality was indeed more due to changes of household structure and employment behavior rather than changes in wages. Moreover, a large part of this increase is compensated by the welfare state.

The potential economic outcomes resulting from a flat rate of income tax have been the subject of an ongoing academic and political debate. Many observers have suggested that the introduction of a flat tax would be beneficial for a country's economy, having a positive influence on the labor market and the gross domestic product by enhancing incentives to work, save, invest, and take risks. A flat tax also significantly simplifies income taxation which increases tax compliance and reduces tax planning, avoidance, and evasion. However, despite flat taxes being on the political agenda in many countries, in practice their implementation has mostly been restricted to the transition economy countries of Eastern Europe. There is no one single flat tax system in place in these countries though; one rate does not fit all.

The flat tax idea has given rise to an ongoing debate both in academics and politics. Further on, it has recently been very successful, especially in transition countries in Eastern Europe. Although flat taxes are high on the political agenda in various Western European countries, they have not been implemented in these grown-up welfare states. The introduction of a flat tax with a basic tax allowance, a low uniform marginal tax rate, and a broad tax base as a reform of existing tax systems is supposed to have several advantages. Most importantly, positive effects on employment and GDP as well as reduced tax distortions are expected. In addition, flat tax reforms are thought to reduce administration and compliance costs as well as incentives for tax avoidance or evasion. However, the distributional effects seem to prevent a flat tax adoption in democracies with a well-established middle class. The motivation of this book is to identify hereby the driving forces behind the economic effects of a flat tax reform. There are two dimensions to be considered that are mutually interdependent: the details of the reform and the environment of its implementation. First, the flat tax design (e.g. parameters such as marginal rate and allowance, tax base simplification or cash flow corporate taxation) plays an important role for the results. Second, the results crucially depend on the country under observation. The underlying income distribution and demographic structure as well as the institutional background (i.e. the tax benefit system, welfare state) are decisive for the outcome of such a reform. The present book contributes to the existing literature in various ways. First, we provide a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in simulation modelling for the ex-ante analysis of tax reform proposals. Second, we analyse and compare different types of welfare states and tax benefit systems especially with respect to the distribution and redistribution of income to explain differing results across countries. Third, we conduct an extensive analysis of the key sources of the economic outcomes of flat tax reforms. For this purpose, the extended methodology of simulation analysis is applied to analyse different hypothetical flat tax scenarios and the impact of their key elements (tax base simplification, marginal tax rate and basic allowance) on equity and efficiency for Germany and the other EU-15 countries in a common microeconometric framework. The analysis differs from the existing literature mainly by analysing the distributional effects as well as the effects on welfare and employment in a uniform simulation model and by applying a systematic approach for choosing the flat tax parameters. As stated above, the aim of this book is to identify the conditions which mainly influence the economic effects of a flat tax reform. The setup of this analysis is as follows. Chapter 2 introduces the methodology. Chapter 3 analyses the relevance of the flat tax design. In chapter 4, the European countries are compared regarding their institutional background and the underlying income distribution. In chapter 5, the role of these country specific aspects and their impact for possible flat tax reforms is investigated. Chapter 6 draws conclusions. At last, what can be learnt from our analysis is that the flatness of the tax schedule itself is not a key feature of the economic success of a tax reform. Other elements (simplification, increased compliance, corporate taxation) play a more important role. However, a flat tax reform can indeed overcome the fundamental equity efficiency trade-off. This is only true in two specific cases: first, for Mediterranean countries with highly polarised income distributions, and second, for Germany in the long-run if accounting for general equilibrium effects. Therefore, due to its adverse short-term distributional effects, the chances that the flat tax idea will invade the grown-up democracies of Western Europe are rather low. However, a further movement towards lower (marginal) tax rates with broader and simpler tax bases shall be observed. This, however, could eventually lead to tax benefit systems moving closer to linearity, albeit without an actual flat tax schedule.

In diesem Beitrag wird die Simulationsanalyse als eine Methode zur empirischen Evaluation von Steuerreformen präsentiert und ein Überblick über die empirische Literatur gegeben. Simulationsanalysen im Bereich der Steuer- und Sozialpolitik können als ökonomisches Experiment verstanden werden, um die komplexen Auswirkungen und insbesondere die Beschäftigungseffekte einer Reform des Steuer- und Transfersystems ex ante zu quantifizieren und anhand dieser Berechnungen eine Entscheidungshilfe für die Auswahl der besten Alternative zu bieten. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit werden fünf verschiedene Modellklassen vorgestellt, miteinander verglichen und jeweils mögliche Anwendungsgebiete beispielhaft präsentiert. Bei den makroökonometrischen Modellen haben sich die allgemeinen Gleichgewichtsmodelle gegenüber den makroökonomischen Modellen, bei den mikroökonometrischen Modellen die Mikrosimulationsmodelle gegen die Gruppensimulationsmodelle durchgesetzt. CGE-Modelle betrachten die gesamtwirtschaftlichen Effekte und basieren auf hoch aggregierten Daten, während die partialanalytischen Mikrosimulationsmodelle auf Mikrodaten zurückgreifen und deshalb die Modellierung viel komplexerer Regelungen und Reformen ermöglichen. In letzter Zeit ist mit den kombinierten Mikro-Makro-Simulationsmodellen eine neue Klasse entstanden, die die Vorteile beider Varianten zu nutzen versucht.

Using a unique dataset of German members of parliament (MPs), this paper analyzes the politicians' wage gap (PWG). After controlling for observable characteristics as well as accounting for election probabilities and campaigning costs, we find a positive income premium for MPs which is statistically and economically significant. Our results are consistent with the citizen candidate model, with a PWG of 35%–65% when comparing MPs to citizens occupying executive positions. However, it shrinks to zero when restricting the control group to top level executives.

This paper provides evidence of efficient taxation of groups with heterogeneous levels of tax morale. We set up an optimal income tax model where high tax morale implies a high subjective cost of evading taxes. The model predicts that nice guys finish last: groups with higher tax morale will be taxed more heavily, simply because taxing them is less costly. Based on unique cross-country micro data and an IV approach to rule out reverse causality, we find empirical support for this hypothesis. Income groups with high tax morale systematically face higher average and marginal tax rates. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to investigate whether differences in tax morale affect the distribution of the tax burden across different groups of taxpayers.

We present the first randomized survey experiment in the context of tax compliance to assess the role of social norms and reciprocity for intrinsic tax morale. We find that participants in a reciprocity treatment have significantly higher tax morale than those in a social-norm treatment. This suggests that a potential backfire effect of social norms is outweighed if the consequences of violating the social norm are made salient. We further document the anatomy of intrinsic motivations for tax compliance and present first evidence that previously found gender effects in tax morale are not driven by differences in risk preferences.

In diesem Beitrag wird die empirische allgemeine Gleichgewichtsanalyse als Methode zur empirischen ex ante Evaluation komplexer ökonomischer Auswirkungen von Steuerreformen vorgestellt und ein Überblick über die empirische Literatur gegeben. Den vielfältigen Anwendungsgebieten dieser Methode sind kaum Grenzen gesetzt. Zunächst wird die theoretische Modellstruktur anhand eines einfachen Grundmodells erläutert, welches in den folgenden Abschnitten sukzessive bis zur Umsetzung des theoretischen Rahmens in ein angewandtes, rechenbares Gleichgewichtsmodell erweitert wird. Die Modellimplementierung durch die sog. Kalibrierung und die ökonometrische Schätzung werden ebenso thematisiert wie die Konstruktion eines mikroökonomisch konsistenten Datensatzes. Schließlich wird ein kurzer Überblick über relevante ökonomische Fragestellungen und Beispiele für deren empirische Untersuchung gegeben, sowie zukünftiger Forschungsbedarf aufgezeigt.