It is well recognised that the issue of the social rate of discount applies only to the gains from public investment that accrues to the public sector. When it comes to measurement, however, there is a problem: Public investment in infrastructure and the like does not usually yield direct...

This paper focuses on the design of a consumption tax in a world of capital risk. The certainty literature discusses two standard options, namely the cash flow method and the pre-payment method (ie, the wage tax), and finds the two approaches to be equivalent. Models that consider capital risk...

The importance of capital loss offset provisions in a world of risk is well documented in the tax literature. However, the potential deadweight losses owing to imperfect offset has not been fully explored. This article develops a framework, whereby that investigation can be carried out, and uses...

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Public investment in infrastructure and the like do not usually yield direct pecuniary returns to the public exchequer. Instead public capital leads to increases in factor productivity in the private economy. This paper argues that government typically shares in the latter gains via the...

In this article, the authors show that a wage tax, which neither alters the relative price of current versus future consumption nor distorts the relative expected return (vis-à-vis the cost) to investing in human capital, leads to biases at both these margins. The authors find that the common...