Abstract

The project “A stronger EU” aims at studying the European Institutions with a focus on the issues of European tax harmonization and EU governance.

In particular, we plan to study tax harmonization with an attention to current and potential redistributive effects of European tax-benefit systems, tax competition (in particular for corporations and high-income individuals), political constraints that affect tax harmonization and the link between tax harmonization and the search for new own resources for the EU budget. We also plan to run experiments to investigate the taxpayers’ reaction to fiscal policies, so to have a better understanding of the consequences of possible regime changes.

For what concerns EU governance, we plan to analyse both vertical power shifts (competences shifted from one level of government to another one) and horizontal ones (from elected governments to unelected bodies which derive their mandates to fix common rules from the national governments), with models, data and experiments.