Given the temptation on government officials to use some of their budget for 'perks,' residents face the problem of inducing officials to reduce such 'waste.' The threat to vote out of office officials who perform poorly is one possible response. In this paper, we explore the effect that...

Changes in tax policy can affect all aspects of the economy. Not only do firms and individuals change behavior, creating efficiency costs, but government expenditure choices can also change. Unless these expenditure choices had been optimal' previously, changes in response to a tax reform affect...

This paper examines how corporate taxation of multijurisdictional firms using formula apportionment affects the incentives faced by individual firms and individual states. We find that formula apportionment creates factor price distortions which vary in general among firms within a state, and in...

-sigma(s) T(s)c(deltaX(s)), where T(s) measures the present value of the taxes that would be paid on a unit of investment in a riskless project with the same expected depreciation rate and tax treatment as capital invested in period s, X(s), while c(X(s)) represents the certainty equivalent to...

Why is interest income taxed more heavily than other forms of capital income? This differential tax treatment has generated substantial tax arbitrage, resulting in lower tax revenue, efficiency costs, and apparently net gains to rich borrowers and net losses to poor lenders, together suggesting...

Recent theoretical work has argued that a small open economy should use residence-based but not source-based taxes on capital income. Given the ease with which residents can evade domestic taxes on foreign earnings from capital, however, a residence-based tax may not be administratively...

To what degree will the recent free-trade agreement create pressure on the U.S. and Canada to modify, and perhaps harmonize, their tax systems? What will be the implications of the more extensive policy changes now going on within the E.C.? This paper examines the types of pressures for reform...

Models of corporate behavior normally assume that a firm acts in the interest of shareholders, and that shareholders care only about the returns they receive on the shares they own in that firm. But shareholders should also care about the effects of a manager's decisions on the value of shares...

This paper explores the characteristics of individual portfolio holdings in a world economy with a unified securities market where there are many countries, each with its own tax rates and inflation rate. When nominal interest is taxable but income to equity owners is tax exempt in all...

In a Federal system of government, each unit of government decides independently how much of each type of public good to provide, and what types of taxes, and which tax rates, to use in funding the public goods. In this paper we explore what types of problems can arise from this decentralized...