The eminent contributors (including Altshuler, Creedy, Freebairn, Gravelle, Heady, Kalb, Sørensen and Zodrow) investigate the beneficial directions for medium-term tax reform in the light of global developments and lessons from the latest taxation research. In addressing this issue, they review...

The dual income tax combines a progressive tax schedule for labor income with a low flat tax rate on capital income and corporate income. This paper restates the case for the dual income tax and discusses alternative methods of taxing business income under such a tax system, paying special...

In the modern welfare state a substantial part of an individual's tax bill is transferred back to the same individual taxpayer in the form of social transfers. This provides a rationale for financing part of social insurance through mandatory savings accounts. We analyze the behavioral and...

We study optimal social insurance aimed at insuring disability risk in the presence of linear income taxation. Optimal disability insurance benefits rise with previous earnings. Optimal insurance is incomplete even though disability risks are exogenous and verifiable so that moral hazard in...

In the modern welfare state a substantial part of an individual’s tax bill is transferred back to the same individual taxpayer in the form of social transfers. This provides a rationale for financing part of social insurance through mandatory savings accounts. We analyze the behavioral and...

A Norwegian tax reform committee recently proposed a personal tax on the realized income from shares after deduction for an imputed risk-free rate of return. This paper describes the design of the proposed shareholder income tax and shows that it will be approximately neutral in several...

All modern labor market theories capable of explaining involuntary unemployment as an equilibrium phenomenon imply that increased income tax progressivity reduces unemployment, but they also imply that higher progressivity tends to reduce work effort and labor productivity. This suggests that...

The paper studies the short-run, dynamic, and steady-state effects of tax policy in an open economy, comparing the macroeconomic effects of a consumption tax with the effects of various types of income tax. The analyticl framework is a model of intertemporal optimization over finite expected...