An important puzzle in corporate taxation is that effective tax rates have fallen significantly while tax revenue has simultaneously risen in most countries. Moreover, the gross profitability of firms seems to be lower in high-tax countries, even though standard models of international...

We offer a new explanation for why taxes have become less progressive in many countries in parallel with an increase in income inequality. When performance-based compensation differentials are needed to incentivize effort, redistribution through progressive income taxes becomes less precisely...

The aging of the population shakes the public finance of pay-as-you-go social security systems. We develop a political-economy framework in which this demographic change leads to the downsizing of the social security system, and, as a consequence, to the emergence of supplemental individual...

The paper employs a standard model of dynamic price competition to study how international principles of value-added taxation affect the stability of collusive agreements when producers in an international duopoly agree not to export into each other's home market and tax rates differ across...

The intratemporal redistribution feature of the welfare state makes it an attractive destination for immigrants, particularly for low-skill immigrants. George Borjas (1994) reports that foreign-born households in the United States accounted for 10 percent of households receiving public...

Migration of young workers (as distinct from retirees), even when driven in by the generosity of the welfare state, slows down the trend of increasing dependency ratio. But, even though low-skill migration improves the dependency ratio, it nevertheless burdens the welfare state. Recent studies...

By introducing controlled-foreign-company (CFC) rules, the parent country of a multinational firm reserves the right to tax the income of the firm's foreign affiliates if the tax rate in the affiliate's host country is below a specified threshold. We identify the conditions under which binding...