Estimating the incidence of and behavioral responses to tax reforms

我们的目标是研究个人、私人家庭和企业对税收和公共转移的行为反应。这项研究建议旨在有助于确定税收和转移支付制度改革的因果关系。这些效应对税收和转移支付系统的优化设计具有重要意义，因此，不仅与学术辩论有关，而且与公共政策讨论有关。由于在过去十年中实施了许多改革，德国的案例可以作为追求我们建议目标的非常合适的背景，可以使用最近研究人员更容易获得的行政数据进行调查。在我们的项目过程中，我们首先估计应税收入弹性（ETI），这是评估税收改革的福利和效率效应的关键参数。在第二步中，我们研究了税收减免是否以及如何被利用来调整ETI和减轻税收负担。我们进一步分析了税收如何影响家庭的劳动力供给决策，特别是中等收入者的行为（例如通过收入分配）。此外，在地方营业税（“Gewerbesteuer”）和最近的增值税改革的背景下，对税收的坚定反应进行了调查。我们希望在这些项目中确定的行为参数可以推导出德国税收和转移系统的效率和分配效果，并有助于评估现有和新的改革建议。

We aim to examine the behavioral responses of individuals, private households and firms to taxes and public transfers. The research proposal intends to contribute to the causal identification of the effects of reforms in the tax and transfer system. These effects are of major significance for the optimal design of tax and transfer systems and, therefore, not only relevant for the academic debate, but also for the public policy discussion. The German case serves as a highly appropriate context to pursue the goals of our proposal since numerous reforms were implemented throughout the past decade, which can be investigated using administrative data that have become more accessible to researchers recently. In the course of our project we first estimate the elasticity of taxable income (ETI), the key parameter for the evaluation of welfare and efficiency effects of tax reforms. In a second step, we examine whether and how tax deductions are exploited to adjust the ETI and reduce tax burdens. We further analyze how taxation affects labor supply decisions of households and in particular the behavior of secondary earners (for example through income splitting). In addition, firm responses to taxes are investigated in the context of the local business tax ("Gewerbesteuer") and the most recent VAT reform. The behavioral parameters we wish to identify in these projects allow deriving the efficiency and distributional effects of the German tax and transferring system, and can help to evaluate existing and new reform proposals.