Substantial variations in the cost of living among regions in the United States are a major impediment to achieving a fair and equitable income tax system. Geographic cost of living differences arise because of disparities in the consumption power of income in different regions. Although the...

Over the past few years, policymakers have argued that everything from Apple's Irish tax deal to patent boxes to the LuxLeaks tax rulings represent “harmful tax competition.” Despite the ubiquity of this term, however, there is no internationally accepted definition of so-called harmful tax...

Technological advancements are playing a transformative role in curtailing the need for labor. These very same forces are catapulting capital in the form of robotics, machinery, and intellectual property to the economic forefront. In virtually every sphere of human existence, labor's decline and...

Virtually every tax system relies upon accurate asset valuations. In some cases, this is an easy identification exercise, and the exact fair market value of an asset is readily ascertainable. Often, however, the reverse is true, and ascertaining an asset’s fair market value yields, at best, a...

How will international integration affect welfare policies? This paper considers the possibilities of financing public sector activities (public consumption and social security expenses) by general (wage) taxation in an economy which becomes more integrated in international product markets. Even...

In the standard multi-period model, the general consumption tax and the wage tax are equivalent. When a capital market is incomplete, such that the rate of return from capital is idiosyncratic, the consumption tax, in contrast to the wage tax, can play a role in risk-sharing. However,...

Nearly forty years after his untimely death, Stanley Surrey, the renowned Harvard law professor (and Treasury official), remains perhaps the most important and influential tax law scholar in American history. The recent publication of his highly illuminating memoirs offers a convenient occasion...

Italy is the first country to have experimented with both accruals and retrospective capital gains along the lines suggested by Vickrey (1939) and Meade (1978). This paper describes the Italian experience highlighting its peculiar features and the lessons that can be learned by other countries...

In this study, the assumption of “the weighted price elasticity of tax is a unit in the developing countries” suggested in the first studies which examine the impacts of the inflation on tax revenues, will be reevaluated for Turkey in the period of 1998-2013. We use Turkish tax and price...

Agglomeration tendencies of industrial firms significantly affect the nature of tax competition. This paper analyzes tax competition between two countries over an infinite time horizon in an economy with trade costs and internationally mobile industrial firms. Most of the previous studies on tax...