@techreport{61491,
  abstract     = {{We examine behavioral frictions in entrepreneurs’ tax planning when choosing between corporate and partnership taxation under a check-the-box rule. Using German tax return data, we show that only a small fraction of entrepreneurs opt for corporate taxation, despite substantial potential tax savings. A pre registered incentivized online experiment demonstrates that complexity aversion, status quo bias, and misperception about the corporate tax burden—arising from the interaction of corporate and deferred dividend taxation—help explain the preference for partnership taxation. We further find that these behavioral frictions heighten liquidity risk under the corporate system, particularly in the face of unexpected cash flow needs. Finally, a survey of German tax advisors indicates that tax advice only partially mitigates these frictions. Some advisors misperceive the benefits of corporate taxation, while others anticipate client biases and therefore refrain from recommending the corporate tax system.}},
  author       = {{Blaufus, Kay and Maiterth, Ralf and Milde, Michael and Sureth-Sloane, Caren}},
  keywords     = {{Check-the-box, Legal Form, Tax Complexity, Tax Misperception, Behavioral Taxation, Tax Advice}},
  pages        = {{107}},
  title        = {{{Choosing the Wrong Box? Behavioral Frictions and Limits of Tax Advice in Tax Regime Choice }}},
  doi          = {{10.2139/ssrn.5378466}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}

@techreport{61508,
  abstract     = {{We investigate how tax authorities use joint tax audits as a coordinated enforcement tool in cross-border transactions of a multinational firm. Joint tax audits aim to resolve potential tax disputes early, before such disputes escalate into costly and time-consuming resolution procedures that may not fully eliminate double taxation. Employing a game-theoretic model, we identify settings in which we expect joint audits to occur and investigate their effect on the firm's expected tax payments and tax audit efficiency. We find that the occurrence of joint audits critically depends on the double taxation risk in the absence of joint audits. Unless tax rules are consistently applied, joint audits can occur more often when this risk is higher. The reason is that the firm changes its income-shifting strategy to reduce its expected tax payments, and thereby also enables tax authorities to better target tax disputes via joint audits that would otherwise escalate. However, we identify conditions under which joint audits are then detrimental to tax audit efficiency, particularly when the firm prefers them most. Our results imply that cost-sharing arrangements for joint audits should be tailored to the level of double taxation risk, with firm involvement having the potential to improve efficiency when this risk is high.}},
  author       = {{Dyck, Daniel and Kourouxous, Thomas and Lorenz, Johannes}},
  keywords     = {{joint tax audits, double taxation, dispute prevention, income shifting}},
  pages        = {{57}},
  title        = {{{An Economic Analysis of Joint Tax Audits}}},
  doi          = {{10.2139/ssrn.5398645}},
  year         = {{2025}},
}

@article{56848,
  abstract     = {{What can the tax authorities do to encourage citizens to pay their taxes more honestly? They can promote honest tax payments in the media! Such tax education, which is completely unfamiliar to German taxpayers, can look back on a long tradition in the USA, for example, and other countries. It has also been practised in Spain since the end of the 1960s and intensified after the transition to democracy. A Treasury television advertisement from 1990 allows an analysis of the narratives used by tax education in the young Spanish democracy. The intense and difficult struggle by state institutions for democratic, equal rights for all citizens even 15 years after Franco's death becomes obvious. }},
  author       = {{Schönhärl, Korinna}},
  journal      = {{Themenportal Europäische Geschichte}},
  keywords     = {{Spanish History, Financial History, Tax History, Video as historical sources}},
  title        = {{{"Contributing means investing in Spain" – Media campaigns on tax education in Spain after the transition to democracy}}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}

@techreport{49873,
  abstract     = {{This study analyzes the impact of tax complexity on the location of tax employees and tax risk. Using a hand-collected dataset of more than 7,500 tax employees from 348 European-listed multinationals, we identify two types of firm-level costs associated with tax complexity—tax employees, and tax risk. We find that firms locate more tax employees in countries with greater tax complexity. This association is particularly pronounced for complexity in tax procedures. We also find that multinationals operating in countries with high tax complexity are associated with higher tax risk. The incremental tax risk vanishes for firms that locate more tax employees in countries with highly complex tax procedures, while we find no risk reduction from additional tax employees in countries with complex tax rules. Our results reveal that multinationals eliminate 25 percent of overall tax complexity-related tax risk through targeted location of tax employees.}},
  author       = {{Giese, Henning and Koch, Reinald and Sureth-Sloane, Caren}},
  keywords     = {{tax complexity, tax complexity cost, tax department, tax employees, tax risk}},
  title        = {{{Where to Locate Tax Employees? The Role of Tax Complexity and Tax Risk Implications}}},
  doi          = {{10.2139/ssrn.4888151}},
  year         = {{2024}},
}

@book{34544,
  abstract     = {{Tax evasion, tax avoidance and tax resistance are widespread phenomena in political, economic, social and fiscal history from antiquity through medieval, early modern and modern times. Histories of Tax Evasion, Avoidance and Resistance shows how different groups and individuals around the globe have succeeded or failed in not paying their due taxes, whether in kind or in cash, on their properties or on their crops.

It analyses how, throughout history, wealthy and poor taxpayers have tried to avoid or reduce their tax burden by negotiating with tax authorities, through practices of legal or illegal tax evasion, by filing lawsuits, seeking armed resistance or by migration, and how state authorities have dealt with such acts of claim making, defiance, open resistance or elusion. It fills an important research gap in tax history, addressing questions of tax morale and fairness, and how social and political inequality was negotiated through taxation. It gives rich insights into the development of citizen-state relationships throughout the course of history. The book comprises case studies from Ancient Athens, Roman Egypt, Medieval Europe, Early Modern Mexico, the Ottoman Empire, Nigeria under British colonial rule, the United Kingdom of the early 20th century, Greece during the Second World War, as well as West Germany, Switzerland, Sweden and the United States in the 20th century, including transnational entanglements in the world of late-modern offshore finance and taxation. The authors are experts in fiscal, economic, financial, legal, social and/or cultural history.
The book is intended for students, researchers and scholars of economic and financial history, social and world history and political economy.
The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license.}},
  author       = {{Schönhärl, Korinna and Hürlimann, Gisela and Rohde, Dorothea}},
  isbn         = {{9781003333197}},
  keywords     = {{Tax History, Financial History}},
  publisher    = {{Routledge}},
  title        = {{{Histories of Tax Evasion, Avoidance and Resistance}}},
  doi          = {{10.4324/9781003333197}},
  year         = {{2023}},
}

@inbook{48165,
  abstract     = {{Paying taxes is a field of economic activity that has always been highly morally charged: the question of who pays how much or can avoid or evade the prescribed payments is always closely related to debate about a fair societal distribution of burdens. In the process of moralisation, therefore, faith communities such as the Catholic Church also repeatedly seized the floor to propagate certain norms. The article examines the contributions of theologians from Spain, the USA and West Germany in the 1940s and 1950s. It concludes that the norms of taxation they propagated differed greatly depending on the institutional and economic frameworks within which they operated. The analysis proves taxation to be a field of economic action and societal dispute where economics and morality are indissolubly interconnected.}},
  author       = {{Schönhärl, Korinna}},
  booktitle    = {{ Reassessing the Moral Economy  Religion and Economic Ethics from Ancient Greece to the 20th Century}},
  editor       = {{Skambraks, Tanja and Lutz, Martin}},
  isbn         = {{9783031298349}},
  keywords     = {{Tax history, religious history: financial history, catholic church, history of economic thought}},
  pages        = {{237--258}},
  publisher    = {{Springer}},
  title        = {{{Tax Morale and the Church: How Catholic Clergies Adapted Norms of Paying Taxes to Secular Institutions (1940s–1950s)}}},
  year         = {{2023}},
}

@inproceedings{34040,
  abstract     = {{<jats:p>Consider the practical goal of making a desired action profile played,

when the planner can only change the payoffs, bound by 

stringent constraints.

Applications include motivating people

to choose the closest school, the closest subway station, or to coordinate

on a communication protocol or an investment strategy.

Employing subsidies and tolls, we adjust the game so that choosing this predefined action profile

becomes strictly dominant. 

Inspired mainly by the work of Monderer and Tennenholtz,

where the promised subsidies do not materialise in the not played

profiles, we provide a fair and individually rational game

adjustment, such that the total outside investments sum up

to zero at any profile, thereby facilitating easy and frequent

usage of our adjustment without bearing costs, even if some

players behave unexpectedly. The resultant action profile itself needs no

adjustment. Importantly, we also prove that our adjustment minimises 

the general transfer among all such adjustments, counting the total subsidising and taxation.</jats:p>}},
  author       = {{Polevoy, Gleb and Dziubiński, Marcin}},
  booktitle    = {{Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence}},
  editor       = {{De Raedt, Luc}},
  keywords     = {{adjustment, strictly dominant, fairness, individually rational, transfer, tax, subsidy}},
  location     = {{Vienna}},
  publisher    = {{International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence Organization}},
  title        = {{{Fair, Individually Rational and Cheap Adjustment}}},
  doi          = {{10.24963/ijcai.2022/64}},
  year         = {{2022}},
}

@article{29049,
  abstract     = {{This study investigates the conditions under which tax rate changes accelerate risky investments.
While tax rate increases are often expected to harm investment, analytical
studies find tax rate increases may foster investment under flexibility.We design a theorybased
experimentwith a binomial random walk and entry–exit flexibility.We find accelerated
investment upon tax rate increases irrespective of an exit option, but no corresponding
response to tax cuts. This asymmetry may be due to tax salience and mechanisms
from irreversible choice under uncertainty. Given this evidence of unexpected tax-reform
effects, tax policymakers should carefully consider behavioral aspects.}},
  author       = {{Fahr, René and Janssen, Elmar A. and Sureth-Sloane, Caren}},
  journal      = {{FinanzArchiv / European Journal of Public Finance}},
  keywords     = {{Economic ExperimentM, Investment Decisions, Tax Effects, Timing Flexibility, Uncertainty}},
  number       = {{1-2}},
  pages        = {{239--289}},
  title        = {{{Can Tax Rate Changes Accelerate Investment under Entry and Exit Flexibility? – Insights from an Economic Experiment}}},
  volume       = {{78}},
  year         = {{2022}},
}

@article{29048,
  abstract     = {{We study the bargaining behavior between auditor and auditee in a tax setting and scrutinize
the effect of interpersonal trust and trust in government on both parties’ concessions.
We find evidence that both kinds of trust affect the concessionary behavior, albeit
in different ways. While trust in government affects concessionary behavior in line with
intuitive predictions, we find that interpersonal trust only affects tax auditors. For high
interpersonal trust, the alleviating effect of high trust in government on tax auditors’
concessions is less pronounced. Our findings help tax authorities to shape programs to
enhance compliance in an atmosphere of trust.}},
  author       = {{Eberhartinger, Eva and Speitmann, Raffael and Sureth-Sloane, Caren and Wu, Yuchen}},
  journal      = {{FinanzArchiv / European Journal of Public Finance}},
  keywords     = {{Behavioral Taxation, Concessionary Behavior, Interpersonal Trust, Tax Audit, Trust in Government}},
  number       = {{1-2}},
  pages        = {{112--155}},
  title        = {{{How Does Trust Affect Concessionary Behavior in Tax Bargaining?}}},
  volume       = {{78}},
  year         = {{2022}},
}

@article{5163,
  abstract     = {{Employing a unique hand-collected sample of 956 credit risk securitization transactions issued by 64 stock-listed
European banks across the EU-13 plus Switzerland over the period from 1997 to 2010, this paper empirically analyzes
the impact of securitization on the issuing banks’ effective tax rates. Our analysis reveals that banks may reduce their
tax expense through securitization via a direct and indirect channel suggesting that tax avoidance may be a further
motive for banks to engage in the securitization business. These baseline findings remain robust under various
robustness checks, especially when implementing structural equation models and controlling for a reverse causality
between the banks’ tax burden and their incentive to securitize. Finally, various sensitivity analyses provide further
important results and implications for tax policies, banking regulation and the ongoing process of revitalizing the
European securitization market.}},
  author       = {{Uhde, André}},
  journal      = {{The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance}},
  keywords     = {{Securitization, Credit risk transfer, Effective tax rates, European banking}},
  pages        = {{411--421}},
  title        = {{{Tax avoidance through securitization}}},
  doi          = {{10.1016/j.qref.2020.07.008}},
  volume       = {{79}},
  year         = {{2021}},
}

@article{17522,
  abstract     = {{Employing a unique hand-collected sample of 956 credit risk securitization transactions issued by 64 stock-listed European banks across the EU-13 plus Switzerland over the period from 1997 to 2010, this paper empirically analyzes the impact of securitization on the issuing banks’ effective tax rates. Our analysis reveals that banks may reduce their tax expense through securitization via a direct and indirect channel suggesting that tax avoidance may be a further motive for banks to engage in the securitization business. These baseline findings remain robust under various robustness checks, especially when implementing structural equation models and controlling for a reverse causality between the banks’ tax burden and their incentive to securitize. Finally, various sensitivity analyses provide further important results and implications for tax policies, banking regulation and the ongoing process of revitalizing the European securitization market.}},
  author       = {{Uhde, André}},
  issn         = {{1062-9769}},
  journal      = {{The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance}},
  keywords     = {{Securitization, Credit risk transfer, Effective tax rates, European banking}},
  title        = {{{Tax avoidance through securitization}}},
  doi          = {{10.1016/j.qref.2020.07.008}},
  year         = {{2020}},
}

@article{17401,
  abstract     = {{Employing a unique hand-collected sample of 956 credit risk securitization transactions issued by 64 stock-listed European banks across the EU-13 plus Switzerland over the period from 1997 to 2010, this paper empirically analyzes the impact of securitization on the issuing banks’ effective tax rates. Our analysis reveals that banks may reduce their tax expense through securitization via a direct and indirect channel suggesting that tax avoidance may be a further motive for banks to engage in the securitization business. These baseline findings remain robust under various robustness checks, especially when implementing structural equation models and controlling for a reverse causality between the banks’ tax burden and their incentive to securitize. Finally, various sensitivity analyses provide further important results and implications for tax policies, banking regulation and the ongoing process of revitalizing the European securitization market.}},
  author       = {{Uhde, André}},
  journal      = {{The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance}},
  keywords     = {{Securitization, credit risk transfer, effective tax rates, European banking}},
  title        = {{{Tax avoidance through securitization}}},
  year         = {{2020}},
}

@techreport{2250,
  abstract     = {{All over the world, firms and governments are increasingly concerned about the rise in tax complexity. To manage it and develop effective simplification measures, detailed information on the current drivers of complexity is required. However, research on this topic is scarce. This is surprising as the latest developments—for example, triggered by the BEPS project—give rise to the conjecture that complexity drivers may have changed, thus questioning the findings of prior studies. In this paper, we shed light on this issue and provide a global picture of the current drivers of tax complexity that multinational corporations face based on a survey of 221 highly experienced tax practitioners from 108 countries. Our results show that prior complexity drivers of the tax code are still relevant, with details and changes of tax regulations being the two most influential complexity drivers. We also find evidence for new relevant complexity drivers emerging from different areas of the tax framework, such as inconsistent decisions among tax officers (tax audits) or retroactively applied tax law amendments (tax enactment). Based on the responses of the practitioners, we develop a concept of tax complexity that distinguishes two pillars, tax code and tax framework complexity, and illustrates the various aspects that should be considered when assessing the complexity of a country’s tax system.}},
  author       = {{Hoppe, Thomas and Schanz, Deborah and Sturm, Susann and Sureth-Sloane, Caren}},
  issn         = {{1556-5068}},
  keywords     = {{Complexity Drivers, International Comparison, Survey, Tax Complexity, Tax Practitioners}},
  pages        = {{28}},
  title        = {{{What are the Drivers of Tax Complexity for Multinational Corporations? Evidence from 108 Countries}}},
  doi          = {{10.2139/ssrn.3046546}},
  year         = {{2017}},
}

@article{3699,
  abstract     = {{When taxes on capital or wealth are levied, in most countries companies have to be assessed in terms of their market value (MV). Estimating the MV of private companies for tax purposes is a challenging task for tax authorities as MVs are not available. In this study, I empirically analyse to what extent an accounting-based tax valuation method for private companies, a simplified residual income model, succeeds in matching the MV. I refer to the mandatory Standardised Combination Model that is a special case of methods commonly used in several countries. In the absence of market prices for private companies, I use a sample of small German public companies as a proxy. I validate this approach using a sensitivity analysis that involves matching the sample of public companies with that of private companies. The results imply that the mandatory Standardised Combination Model leads to a severe unequal treatment not only between public and private companies but also among private companies across and within industries. Furthermore, I simulate the effects of variation in the key parameters and highlight their impact on the approximation quality of the Standardised Combination Method. The findings are relevant to tax reform discussions as well as to tax policy-makers and practitioners in many countries.}},
  author       = {{Müller, Jens}},
  journal      = {{European Accounting Review}},
  keywords     = {{Challenge of Assessing, Tax Purposes}},
  number       = {{1}},
  pages        = {{117----141}},
  title        = {{{The challenge of assessing the market value of private companies using a standardised combination method for tax purposes--Lessons to be learnt from past experience}}},
  year         = {{2014}},
}

@article{5108,
  abstract     = {{This study integrates the government in the context of company valuation. Our framework allows to analyze and to quantify the risk-sharing effects and conflicts of interest between the government and the shareholders when firms follow different financial policies. We provide novel evidence that firms with fixed future levels of debt might invest more than socially desirable. Economically, this happens if the gain in tax-shields is big enough to outweigh the loss in the unlevered firm value. Our findings have implications for the practice of investment subsidy programs provided by the government to avoid fostering investments beyond the socially optimal level. }},
  author       = {{Kreutzmann, Daniel and Sievers, Sönke and Mueller, Christian}},
  journal      = {{Applied Financial Economics (VHB-JOURQUAL 4 Ranking C)}},
  keywords     = {{corporate tax claim, company valuation, optimal investment, cost of capital}},
  number       = {{11}},
  pages        = {{977--989}},
  publisher    = {{Taylor \& Francis}},
  title        = {{{Investment distortions and the value of the government's tax claim}}},
  doi          = {{10.1080/09603107.2013.786161}},
  volume       = {{23}},
  year         = {{2013}},
}

@article{3693,
  abstract     = {{Erbschaftsteuer | Inheritance tax | Steuerreform | Tax reform | Steuerwirkung | Tax effects | Steuereinnahmen | Tax revenue | Mikrodaten | Microdata | Simulation | Deutschland | Germany}},
  author       = {{Maiterth, Ralf and Houben, Henriette and Broekelschen, Wiebke and Müller, Jens and Sureth-Sloane, Caren}},
  journal      = {{Statistik und Wissenschaft}},
  keywords     = {{Erbschaftsteuer | Inheritance tax | Steuerreform | Tax reform | Steuerwirkung | Tax effects | Steuereinnahmen | Tax revenue | Mikrodaten | Microdata | Simulation}},
  pages        = {{163----183}},
  title        = {{{Mikroanalytische Begleitung der Steuerpolitik am Beispiel der Erbschaftsteuerreform}}},
  year         = {{2009}},
}