It is entirely appropriate that the study of public finance take seriously "behavioral" inconsistencies with traditional models of individual and collective decision-making. This raises the question of whether the state should play a role in protecting individuals from themselves, and whether...

The tax-systems perspective considers a variety of costs and behavioral margins often ignored in standard tax analysis: administrative and compliance costs, evasion and avoidance behavior, and multiple non-rate tax-system instruments (e.g., withholding and public disclosure). We show how the...

The theory of optimal taxation has , for the pas two decades , been the reigning normative approach of taxation. This paper argues that , in its current state, optimal tax theory is incomplete as a guide to action concerning many critical issues in tax policy. It is incomplete because it has not...