The Male-Female Gap in Physician Earnings: Evidence from a Public Health Insurance System

Empirical evidence from U.S. studies suggests that, on average, female physicians earn less than their male counterparts. This gap in earnings does not disappear when individual and market characteristics are con- trolled for. This paper investigates whether a gender earnings difference can also be observed in a health care system predominantly financed by public insurance companies. Using a unique data set of physicians' earn- ings recorded by a public social security agency in an Austrian province between 2000 and 2004, we find a gender gap in average earnings of about 32 percent. A substantial share of this gap (20 to 47 percent) cannot be explained by individual and market characteristics, leaving labor market discrimination as one possible explanation for the observed gender earn- ings difference of physicians.Health care financing; physician earnings; wage composition

Saving Taxes Through Foreign Plant Ownership

This paper analyzes to which extent foreign plant ownership involves lower tax payments than domestic plant ownership. We employ a model of endogenous foreign subsidiary ownership to derive a set of empirically testable hypotheses about the differential taxation of foreign- and domestically-owned subsidiaries. We assess these hypotheses in a data- set of 33,577 European foreign- and domestically-owned manufacturing plants. We identify a significant tax-saving of endogenous foreign owner- ship. On average, foreign owners pay 594 Euros per employee or about 56 percent less than domestic owners of similar subsidiaries. This effect is larger in thinner markets with fewer plants, in markets with a greater relative presence of foreign owners, and for foreign owners of larger plants.company taxation, multinational firms, propensity score matching

Distance Matters - Evidence from Professional Team Sports

This paper assesses the role of distance in professional team sports, taking the example of football (soccer). We argue that a team’s performance in terms of scored and conceded goals decreases with the distance to the foreign playing venue. To test this hypothesis empirically, we investigate 6,389 away games from the German Football Premier League (’Erste Deutsche Bundesliga’) between the playing seasons 1986-87 and 2006-07. We find that distance contributes significantly in explaining a guest team’s propensity to concede goals, but not so for scoring goals. Focusing on the difference between scored and conceded goals (‘goal difference’) as a measure of the overall success of a football team, we observe a significant and non-monotonic impact of distance on team performance.Professional team performance, distance, event count data, poisson regression model

Incorporation and Taxation: Theory and Firm-level Evidence

This paper provides a theory and firm-level evidence on the incorporation decision of entrepreneurs in a model of taxes and corporate governance. The theory explains how the incorporation decision of entrepreneurs is driven by taxation (corporate and personal income taxes), corporate transparency, access to external capital and limited liability. We estimate features of this model using a large cross-section of more than 540, 000 firms in European manufacturing. We find that higher personal income tax rates favor incorporation while higher corporate tax rates reduce the probability to incorporate. These findings are robust to the inclusion of other economic and institutional determinants of external financing and choice of organizational form.incorporation, governance, taxes, discrete choice models

Der Kampf gegen internationale Steuerhinterziehung: Die OECD Initiativen gegen Steueroasen

Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird untersucht, ob sich ein internationales Vorgehen gegen Steueroasen rechtfertigen lässt und welche Instrumente dabei gewählt werden sollen. Es wird argumentiert, dass durch die Ausklammerung der Unternehmensbesteuerung aus den OECD Maßnahmen gegen Steueroasen Hinterziehungsmöglichkeiten im Unternehmensbereich und bei natürlichen Personen entstehen, welche die geringe Effektivität der OECD Initiativen erklären können

Corporate Taxation and Multinational Activity

This paper assesses the impact of corporate taxation on multinational activity. A numerically solvable general equilibrium model of trade and multinational firms is used to incorporate the following components of corporate taxation: parent and host country statutory corporate tax rates, withholding tax rates, and parent and host country depreciation allowances. We account for their differential impact under alternative methods of double taxation relief (i.e., credit, exemption, and deduction). The hypotheses regarding the effects of changes in the tax parameters are investigated in a panel of bilateral OECD outbound stocks of foreign direct investment (FDI) from 1991 to 2002. For this, we compile annual information on taxation to construct the largest existing panel of tax parameters at the bilateral level based on national tax law and bilateral tax treaties. Our findings indicate that the parent country's statutory corporate tax rate tends to foster outward FDI, whereas the host country's statutory corporate and withholding tax rates are negatively associated with outward FDI. Depreciation allowances exert a significant impact on FDI, as hypothesized.corporate taxation, foreign, direct investment, panel econometrics

Taking the high road? Compliance with commuter tax allowances and the role of evasion spillovers

This paper provides evidence of evasion in the context of a widely used commuter tax allowance, and explores evasion spillovers as a determinant of the individual compliance decision. For this purpose, we exploit discontinuities in the commuter allowance scheme and employ a research design resting on a large panel of individual tax returns. We find that around 30 percent of all allowance claims are overstated and, consistent with deliberate tax evasion, we observe sharp reactions of taxpayers to thresholds where the allowance discretely jumps to a higher amount. Further, we use variation in job changes to uncover spillover effects from the work environment on the individual compliance decision. These effects appear to be asymmetric: Job changers moving to companies with a higher fraction of cheaters increase their cheating. In contrast, movers to companies with a lower fraction of cheaters tend not to alter their reporting behavior. We provide suggestive evidence that the spillover has more to do with an information environment, but can ultimately not reject other behavioral explanations such as asymmetric persistence of norms