TAX REFORM OF THE CENTURY—THE SWEDISH EXPERIMENT

The Truth About Tax Reform

Tax Reform and Poverty

The tax system has a pervasive impact on poverty, both directly through its role in the distribution of society’s resources and indirectly through its effects on the incentives for economic decisions like working and saving. The two most important facets of the tax system for low-income families are payroll taxes and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), the former of which levies a tax on earne...

Evaluating International Tax Reform

This paper introduces “capital ownership neutrality” (CON) and “national ownership neutrality” (NON) as benchmarks for evaluating the desirability of international tax reforms, and applies them to analyze recent U.S. tax reform proposals. Tax systems satisfy CON if they do not distort the ownership of capital assets, which promotes global efficiency whenever the productivity of an investment di...

The Distributional Effects of Environmental Tax Reform

In recent years there has been increased debate about the potential for shifting the incidence of the tax system away from a variety of economic ‘goods’ (i.e. employment, investment, etc ...) and towards environmental ‘bads’ (i.e. pollution emissions, resource extraction, etc ...). However, in spite of their apparent efficiency, economic instruments have been adopted relatively less frequently ...

The Dynamic Process of Tax Reform

The tax reform literature, pioneered by Guesnerie [1977], uses static models but implicitly views tax reform as a dynamic process, i.e., as a policy-maker implementing incremental reforms over time. This paper studies tax reform in a dynamic version of the Diamond-Mirrlees-Guesnerie model and focuses on a specific aspect of the dynamic process, namely, the implications for tax reform of agents ...