The differences in Canadian and US aggregate savings rates do not appear to be attributable to the Registered Retirement Savings Plan program in Canada.

While economists have analyzed consumption, income and (impersonal) real property taxation, relatively little research has been conducted on the effects of a personal net wealth tax or capital levies or capital transfer taxation, all of which are the subject of this paper. The conventional...

The authors extend Deaton's atemporal optimal commodity tax model to a life-cycle environment in which the individual may choose to work in many periods. The authors are able to confirm the Corlett-Hague intuition--goods that are more complementary with leisure should be taxed at higher rates....

The contemporary preoccupation with the optimality of consumption over income taxation dwells uneasily alongside the ambiguities in the older optimal tax literature. The recent literature has become mired in questions of optimal debt policy, to such an extent that one cannot adopt a position on...