E-commerce in physical goods enhances the degree of product market competition but leads also to higher trading costs as goods bought through the internet are shipped individually. Do these features of e-commerce support a case for granting preferential tax treatment to online shopping? This is...

It is shown that although government debt in principle has an ambiguous effect on the steady state capital stock in an OLG model of the Blanchard-Cass-Yaari variety, once stability of the steady state equilibrium is imposed there is an unambiguous negative relation between the level of...

Using a two-period model with two types of agents that are characterized by present-biased preferences second-best optimal tax-transfer policies are considered. The paternalistic optimal tax-transfer policy has two main concerns: Income redistribution from high to low ability households and...

In a two-type Stiglitz (1982) model of optimal non-linear taxation it is shown that when the utility function relating to consumption is logaritmic the shadow price of the incentive constraint relating to the optimal tax problem exactly equals the Gini coefficient of the secondbest optimal...

Tax competition among countries generally leads to inefficiently low tax rates on mobile tax bases like capital income. This should call for cooperative tax policies to be implemented, but as long as some countries do not take part in the cooperation the incentives for a subset of countries to...