The paper sets up an overlapping model of two economies linked by capital mobility to study the potential welfare gains from international coordination of tax and expenditure policies. The first part of the paper deals with the long run and finds that if the marginal source of public finance is...

Using Danish data, we find that about three fourths of the taxes levied to finance public transfers actually finance benefits that do not redistribute between people but redistribute income over the life cycle of individual taxpayers. This provides a rationale for financing part of social...

We analyse recent proposals to shift the tax burden away from low-paid labour, assuming a dual labour market where the 'good' high-paying jobs are rationed. A shift in the tax burden from low-paid to high-paid workers has an ambiguous effect on the level of aggregate employment while the...

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...

Tax competition for mobile capital can undermine the attempts of governments to redistribute income from rich to poor. I study whether international tax coordination can alleviate this problem, using a general equilibrium model synthesizing recent contributions to the tax competition literature....

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...

The paper discusses the implications of optimal tax theory for the debates on uniform commodity taxation and neutral capital income taxation. While strong administrative and political economy arguments in favor of uniform and neutral taxation remain, recent advances in optimal tax theory suggest...

This study evaluates the economic effects of corporate tax coordination in the enlarged European Union using a computable general equilibrium model and a comprehensive set of scenarios for both a common corporate EU tax base and for full harmonisation of tax bases and tax rates. Our main...

The theory of optimal taxation has often been criticized for being of little practical policy relevance, due to a lack of robust theoretical results. This paper argues that recent advances in optimal tax theory has made that theory easier to apply and may help to explain some current trends in...