Dr. Marta Castelon, a former research associate at the MPI for Tax Law and Public Finance, was again awarded for her doctoral thesis – with one of Germany’s most highly remunerated awards in the field of economics and social sciences.
On 19 June 2018 the Roman Herzog Institute (RHI) awarded the lawyer with the third prize for Social Market Economy Research (Forschungspreis Soziale Marktwirtschaft 2018), supported by the vbw – the Bavarian Business Association (Vereinigung der Bayerischen Wirtschaft e.V). The festive ceremony took place in Munich and was attended by the RHI CEO, Prof. Randolf Rodenstock, and amongst others, by vbw President Alfred Gaffal and Prof. Dr. Christoph M. Schmidt, President of RWI, Chairman of the “Five Wise Men” and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance.
PhD and postdoctoral students from different areas of knowledge from all parts of Germany took part in the competition. Only ten were invited to the second stage of the competition – a lecture to the prestigious Roman Herzog Institute’s scientific board. Out of this group, the prize winner were selected.
Dr. Castelon’s dissertation “International Taxation of Income from Services under Double Taxation Conventions – Development, Practice and Policy” deals with the challenges of digitalization for tax law – a central question for the social market economy in the coming years. The lawyer shows how tax justice can be improved given the challenges digitalization imposes. She opts for a reform of the international taxation of services in accordance with a directive of the European Commission. Accordingly, the physical presence of a company alone should no longer be decisive for taxation, but rather the turnover generated at the “digital permanent establishment”. The work was supervised by Professor Wolfgang Schön, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Tax Law and Public Finance, alongside Professor Luís Eduardo Schoueri from the University of São Paulo in Brazil.
The other prizewinners of the Forschungspreis Soziale Marktwirtschaft 2018 are: Dr. Heiko Burret, who received the first place for his dissertation “Fiscal rules and fiscal sustainability”, and Prof. Dr. Korbinian von Blanckenburg, who received the second place for his habilitation “Development of competitive economic methods for the detection and reduction of market power abuse”. Dr. Marta Castelon shares the third place with Prof. Dr. Laura Marie Edinger-Schons, who was awarded for her habilitation thesis “Essays on corporate social responsibility (CSR) and marketing”. As both third-placed projects show a high scientific level of equal rank, the RHI jury decided to award each of them the third place and to increase the prize money accordingly this year.
The work of Marta Castelon has now been awarded for the third time. Prior to this she was honoured by the German Scientific Institute of Tax Consultants (Deutsches wissenschaftliches Institut der Steuerberater e.V. [DWS Institute]) with the DWS Science Prize 2017, followed by a prize from the Munich University Society. Castelon's dissertation was published in 2018 by Kluwer in "Series on International Taxation".
June 2018