Fiscal Equalisation among the states in Germany

Germany's fiscal federalism has undergone a process of perpetual reform. On the one hand, some tax sources that have existed up to now – the corporate income tax is a good example in this context – will shortly be phased out because of changes in the system. On the other hand the judgement by the Constitutional Court has required a renewal of Germany's equalisation system. Besides an illustration of tax sharing between the three tiers of government, the main part of this paper deals with the equalisation among the 16 federal states. In the framework of the reforming process of the "Solidarity Pact IIW, the distribution of tax revenues, vertical grants and fiscal equalisation among the federal states were newly arranged.Fiscal Federalism, Grants, Fiscal Autonomy, Germany

QUEST II. A multi country business cycle and growth model. Economic Papers No. 123, October 1997. II/509/97-EN

From the Introduction. QUEST was designed to analyse the economies in the member states of the European Union and their interactions with the rest of the world, especially with the United States and Japan. The focus of the model is on the transmission of the effects of economic policy both on the domestic and the international economy. The model was primarily constructed to serve as a tool for policy simulation; less emphasis was put on its ability to serve as a forecasting tool. Given the wide coverage of the model it must necessarily be highly aggregated. A high degree of aggregation and foundation of the specification in current macroeconomic theory also helps in interpreting and understanding the results of the simulations. Finally simplicity also facilitates the solution of the model and reduces the time and memory requirements of the computer-simulations. The new model contains structural models for the EU member states, the US and Japan and distinguishes 10 additional countries/regions in trade feedback models in order to model trade interactions with the rest of the world

Dynamically generated edge states in topological Kondo insulators

Kondo insulators combine strong electronic correlations with spin orbit coupling and thereby provide a potential realization of correlated topological insulators. We present model calculations which allow us to study the onset of bulk coherence and concomitant topological edge states from the mixed valence to local moment regimes. Our real-space dynamical mean-field results include the detailed temperature dependence of the single particle spectral function on slab geometries as well as the temperature dependence of the topological invariant. The relevance of our calculations for candidate materials like SmB6 is discussed.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Estimation of real equilibrium exchange rates.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a consistent and transparent theoretical and empirical framework to analyse real effective equilibrium exchange rates for a large number of industrial countries. The theoretical and empirical model, as well as the applied methodology, are closely related to a recently published working paper by the IMF (Alberola et.al (1999)).In the theoretical part, a macroeconomic model of internal and external equilibrium is presented (chapters 2, 3 and 4). The empirical part estimates a simplified version of the theoretical model and results are thereafter reported and evaluated on a country by country basis (chapter 5). The purpose of the empirical part is not to arrive at point estimates for equilibrium exchange rates, but rather to provide some basic econometric evidence as a complement and illustration of the theoretical analysis. The empirical model and statistical methodology is kept simple and uniform for all countries in order to facilitate interpretation and evaluation of the results.exchange rates, modelling

Tax Morale and Fiscal Autonomy: Evidence from Germany

Why people pay their taxes voluntarily is a key puzzle in the public finance literature. Some suggest that factors such as the level of tax morale, defined as the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes, affects compliance behaviour. While there have been numerous studies that have explored tax compliance or tax evasion, very few have explored the concept of tax morale in any detail. The basic intention of the empirical part is to analyse how fiscal autonomy affects tax morale in Germany. This also allows fill a gap in the tax compliance literature, which has rarely analysed the impact of fiscal autonomy on tax compliance or tax morale. Strong evidence has been found that a higher fiscal autonomy leads to a higher tax morale, controlling in a multivariate analysis for additional factors.

Equalisation and Local Taxation in Denmark, Norway and Sweden

Education is one of the most important services provided by public governments in almost every country worldwide. However, the most important cross-country observations about education ? like the PISA report by the OECD or the TIMSS by the IEA ? focus only on international benchmarks to compare the knowledge capacity of pupils. This paper provides a general overview of the different forms to finance education in the framework of intergovernmental transfers as well as educational providers in ten European countries. We observe the educational system in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom and point out the similarities and national distinctions in the respective transfer system regarding education financing or the allocation mechanism for primary and secondary schools as well as universities.Fiscal Federalism, Grants, Fiscal Autonomy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden

Financing of Education: Some Experiences from ten European Countries.

Education is one of the most important services provided by public governments in almost every country worldwide. However, the most important cross-country observations about education ? like the PISA report by the OECD or the TIMSS by the IEA ? focus only on international benchmarks to compare the knowledge capacity of pupils. This paper provides a general overview of the different forms to finance education in the framework of intergovernmental transfers as well as educational providers in ten European countries. We observe the educational system in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom and point out the similarities and national distinctions in the respective transfer system regarding education financing or the allocation mechanism for primary and secondary schools as well as universities.Intergovernmental transfers, Educational Finance, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom

Operational Gaussian Schmidt-Number Witnesses

The general class of Gaussian Schmidt-number witness operators for bipartite systems is studied. It is shown that any member of this class is reducible to a convex combination of two types of Gaussian operators using local operations and classical communications. This gives rise to a simple operational method, which is solely based on measurable covariance matrices of quantum states. Our method bridges the gap between theory and experiment of entanglement quantification. In particular, we certify lower bounds of the Schmidt number of squeezed thermal and phase-randomized squeezed vacuum states, as examples of Gaussian and non-Gaussian quantum states, respectively.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figure