Capital, an Elusive Tax Object and Impediment to Sustainable Taxation

Capital Taxation, Globalization, and International Tax Competition

The historical evolution of the corporate tax burden in the OECD nations is studied, beginning with an assessment of alternative measures of the burden. Descriptive analysis of these time series reveals no evidence of a competitive “race to the bottom” in capital taxation, and little evidence of even a harmonization of the tax burden. These conclusions for the OECD and Europe as a whole are con...

Tax Morale and Optimal Taxation

We study experimentally how taxpayers choose between two tax regimes to fund a public good. The first-best tax regime imposes a general, distortion-free income tax. However, this tax cannot be enforced. The second-best alternative supplements the income tax by a specific commodity tax. This tax cannot be evaded but distorts optimal consumption choices, instead. The result is that a large majori...

Taxation and Capital Spending

Tax Evasion, Taxation Inspection and Net Tax Revenue: from an Optimal Tax Administration Perspective

Tax evasion has always been an important topic to tax theory researchers and the department of government. However, existing research results are confined to the unilateral action of taxpayers, neglect the interaction between the tax declaration and taxation inspection. This paper, from an optimal tax administration perspective, builds a general equilibrium model, in which, taxation inspection ...

Housing Taxation and Capital Accumulation

This paper studies the impact of the preferential tax treatment of housing capital in a model economy that includes the main housing tax provisions currently in place in the U.S. and a minimum downpayment requirement upon purchasing non-divisible houses. Distortions arise because the tax code makes the return on housing capital larger than that on business capital. The wedge between the two rat...