CONFISCATING CAPITAL AND INCENTIVE BY TAXATION

Taxation and Capital Spending

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...

Optimal Indirect and Capital Taxation

We consider an environment in which agents’ skills are private information and follow arbitrary stochastic processes. We prove that it is typically Pareto optimal for an individual’s marginal benefit of investing in capital to exceed his marginal cost of doing so. This wedge is consistent with a positive tax on capital income. We also prove that it is Pareto optimal for the marginal rate of sub...

Taxation and Human Capital Accumulation

How do taxes affect human capital accumulation? This question has been studied extensively in the context of two model classes: overlapping generations (OLG) and infinite horizon (IH) models. These embody very different assumptions about the intergenerational transmission of physical and human capital. OLG models typically abstract from intergenerational linkages, while IH models implicitly ass...

Capital Gains Taxation and Entrepreneurship

The taxation of capital gains is a perennial issue in tax policy. One critical aspect for understanding the overall effects of capital gains taxation is how these taxes affect entrepreneurs. While many analyses focus on the disincentive effects created by capital gains taxes for investors in large corporations, these disincentives may be even more important for entrepreneurs. This paper discuss...