This paper examines the appropriate taxation of financial services under a broad-based consumption tax. It is assumed that the underlying objective of the consumption tax is to maintain undistorted prices between current and future consumption (i.e. to impose no distortion on savings decisions)...

Much attention has been given to the impact of fiscal competition on the level of public expenditure, but relatively little to the impact on its composition. Using a broadly familiar and reasonably rich model of fiscal competition in the presence of mobile capital, this paper establishes a...

India has a long history of running fiscal deficits. Two broad considerations motivate a government to run a deficit: tax smoothing and tax tilting. This paper tests a version of Barro's tax smoothing model, using Indian data for the period 1951-52 to 1966-97. The empirical results indicate that...

We use a model of intertemporal tax smoothing to examine long run data on fiscal policy in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. We find that the intertemporal model provides a good description of tax policy for the United States but is rejected for Australia and for the UK.

This paper studies the incidence of tax-transfer policy in a growth model wherein individuals differ according to their level of intergenerational altruism and have an endogenous labor supply. The main results is that public debt is neutral at the macro level but redistributes resources from...

In the problem of optimal taxation in an economy with two productive factors, labor and capital, the optimal solution when the government can commit to a sequence of tax rates, has the tax on capital tending to zero in the limit, with all the tax burden on labour. It is well known, however, that...

This paper tests Barro's (1979) tax smoothing model of fiscal policy. The model implies that budget deficits and surpluses are used optimally to minimise the distortionary effects of taxation, given a certain path of spending. The theory has a number of implications both for the statistical time...

With sufficiently well-reasoned and principled reform of tax systems, it is possible to achieve practical simplicity and a reduction in perverse incentives to a far greater degree than under any of the "flat-rate" proposals being advanced, without significant sacrifice of progressivity. But it...