Following Keen and Marchand (1997), the paper analyses the effect of fiscal competition on the composition of public spending in a model where capital and skilled workers are mobile while low skilled workers are immobile. Taxes are levied on capital and labour. Each group of workers benefits from a different kind of public good. Mobility of skilled workers provides an incentive for jurisdiction...

If a government imposes a tax on capital income, it may, as a result, lower the private rate of return on capital below the growth rate of an economy, thereby giving rise to the possibility of running a permanent deficit. Since, however, the before-tax rate of return and not the after-tax rate of return is relevant for judging the dynamical efficiency of the economy, the possibility of a perman...

I examine the effect of labor income taxation in life-cycle models where work experience builds human capital. In this case, the wage no longer equals the opportunity cost of time – which is, instead, the wage plus returns to work experience. This has a number of interesting consequences. First, the data appear consistent with much larger labor supply elasticities than most prior work suggests....

According to the existing literature, capital taxes should not be imposed in the presence of optimal profit taxation in either unionised or competitive labour markets. We show that this conclusion does not hold for an economy with dual labour markets, where the competitive wage rate provides the outside option for unionised workers. Even with non-distortionary profit taxation it is optimal for ...

In this paper we analyze the effect of increasing labor (i.e. graduates’/academics’) and student mobility on net tax revenues when revenuemaximizing governments compete for human capital by means of income tax rates and amenities offered to students (positive expenditure) or rather tuition fees (negative expenditure). We demonstrate that these instruments are strategic complements and that incr...

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 ...

This paper evaluates the design and the desirability of business taxes in small open economies, in light of evidence of the impact of taxation on the activities of multinational firms. The high degree of international capital mobility implies that small countries benefit by reducing their tax rates below the rates of other countries with whom they compete, possibly to the point of eliminating a...

Dynamic computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, such as the MONASH model developed at the Centre of Policy Studies, typically use complex dynamic investment mechanisms to generate dynamic growth paths. Even so, these models don’t account for corporate finance and corporate taxation in determining investment outcomes. This paper provides final results from a work program aimed at imposing c...

This paper studies capital accumulation and consumption in the traditional Ramsey model under an exogenous growth framework. The model has three important features: (1) treating health as a simple function of consumption, which enable the study of health and growth in an aggregate macroeconomic model; (2) the existence of multiple equilibria of capital stock, health, and consumption, which is m...