Tax Reforms - Taxes Without Tax Laws

Socially-Efficient Tax Reforms∗

We propose graphical methods to determine whether commodity-tax changes are “socially efficient”, in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. We also derive estimators of critical poverty lines and economic efficiency ratios which can be used to characterize socially-efficient tax reforms. The statistical properties of ...

Tax Laws and Filing Requirements

Labor Taxes, Productivity and Tax Competition

Why are taxes higher in Europe than in the US? We propose that it stems from lesser competition across jurisdictions within Europe. We embed self-interested governments and tax competition into a standard neoclassical growth model with public goods. While greater jurisdictional competition reduces taxes it also reduces societal investment in public capital and thus often ends up reducing total ...

Poverty-Reducing Tax Reforms with Heterogeneous Agents

The poverty impact of indirect tax reforms is analyzed using sequential stochastic dominance methods. This allows agents to differ in dimensions that cannot always be precisely captured within the usual money-metric indicators of living standards. Examples of such dimensions include household size and composition, temporal or spatial variation in price indices, and individual needs and “merits”.

Tax Reforms and Evidence of Transfer Pricing

The manipulation of transfer prices changes the relative tax burdens multinational firms face in their different countries of operation and may even reduce a firm’s worldwide tax payments. At the same time, transfer price manipulation will often trigger changes in the tariffs that are levied on intra-company imports. For this reason, when tax rates change, as they did for many countries during ...