Documents Kemmerling, Achim 8 results

"This article argues that the long-term shift in the incidence of taxation from capital to labour has shifted the centre of political conflicts from representatives of capital to those of labour. The fact that most taxation has become an increasing and regressive burden on labour in mature welfare states creates new divides in tax policies among left politicians. To demonstrate this, the article applies the literature on new divides to the case of tax policy. A comparison of German tax policy debates in the late 19th and late 20th centuries reveals that major conflict lines were intra-class, and that over time these lines have shifted from capital to labour. The article concludes that as the origins of new divides are often endogenous to welfare-state politics, the literature on new divides greatly benefits from a historical ‘turn'."

"Whereas governments had previously designed early exit policies to unburden labour markets, they have come increasingly to regard them as problematic. We investigate the reasons for this policy reversal, focusing on two key actors: governments and trade unions. Our mixed-methods approach entails two major steps: first, we embed approaches to policy reform in a common framework to show the empirical relevance of the two major actors in most OECD countries. We find that both government ideology and union representativeness matter. In a second step, we investigate reform processes in two countries in more detail. Belgium and the Netherlands have much in common as regards government and interest groups but differ in terms of the reversal of early exit policies. We see that both the configuration of electoral and welfare state institutions have shaped the specific strategic environment of the two actors in both countries."

"Tax competition in the European Union is shaped by four partly opposed institutional mechanisms. While market integration and enlargement increase competitive pressure, the tax co-ordination of the Council of Ministers and the tax jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice could potentially reduce it. The net effect is to accelerate tax competition. This article presents quantitative evidence to suggest that tax competition is stronger in the EU than in the rest of the world, and explores qualitatively why tax co-ordination and tax jurisprudence have failed to prevent a race to the bottom in tax rates."

"This paper investigates the long-term evolution of the tax system in Germany to explain why the political left has increasingly expanded taxation to its own clientele. The paper contrasts the second half of the 19th with the second half of the 20th century to show that some of the underlying parameters of tax systems have changed over time. In particular these are the existence of a mature welfare state and the significance of real wages as a tax base. Moreover, the paper selectively uses comparisons with the United Kingdom (UK) to show that where these conditions are absent the structure of the tax system is very different and taxes labour much less than in Germany. In this sense the British self-transformation of the welfare state has had very different political consequences than the German."

"This article investigates how different ideas about value-added taxation (VAT) frame the partisan politics of the welfare state. It employs a content analysis of German and British politicians' motives in parliamentary debates on whether and why to increase VAT rates. A qualitative comparison reveals that there are remarkable differences between the two countries. In Germany, there is a clear and consistent shift in the efficiency frame from macroeconomic condemnation to microeconomic appraisal even among left politicians. This is not visible in British debates, where traditional partisan contestation prevails. The difference in efficiency frames is closely related to unemployment becoming a much more salient issue in Germany than in the UK. The quantitative analysis shows that speakers are indeed more likely to mention the efficiency frame when they are concerned about the labour market."

"In recent years, many scholars have investigated the incredible rise of executive pay and the role of institutions as moderators of this trend. We argue that a crucial problem for attempts to moderate these increases remains the heterogeneity among top managers. Redistributive institutions can better target pay inequality among management than institutions that treat all managers or companies the same. To show this, we use a novel data set of executive pay across 17 OECD countries. We compare the effect of different institutional factors: corporate and personal income taxation, union bargaining power, and regulation (shareholder protection). We find that redistributive institutions such as personal income tax and union bargaining power seem to be more effective in addressing this heterogeneity in pay and in moderating remuneration in firms with very large market value than smaller firms."