We study the price effects of a temporary VAT reduction in Germany using a web-scraped dataset of daily prices of more than 60000 supermarket products. For causal identification, we compare the development of German prices to those in Austria. We find that the reduction of VAT rates led to a price decrease of 1.3%, implying that 70% of the tax cut were passed on to consumers. Moreover, the pass-through is higher for vertically integrated products (private label) than for independent brands. This is consistent with menu cost theories and theories predicting that price markups act as a buffer for cost shocks.

中文翻译：

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临时增值税税率下调的传导：来自德国超市零售业的证据

我们使用网络抓取的 60000 多种超市产品每日价格数据集来研究德国临时增值税减免的价格影响。为了进行因果识别，我们将德国价格的发展与奥地利的价格发展进行了比较。我们发现，增值税税率的降低导致价格下降了1.3%，这意味着减税的70%转嫁给了消费者。此外，垂直整合产品（自有品牌）的传递率高于独立品牌。这与菜单成本理论和预测价格加成作为成本冲击缓冲的理论是一致的。