In all modern industrial countries, redistributive expenditures are a larger component of the government budget than consumption of goods and services. In this paper, we use a general equilibrium, two-country model with exportables, importables and nontraclables to study redistribution across different types of agents in a world characterized by the presence of labor unions and distortionary ta...

We analyze the taxation of top personal incomes in Germany on the basis of an integrated data file of individual tax returns and a general household survey for the years 1992 – 2002 which includes all taxpayers in the top percentile of the gross income distribution. We show that the distribution of the tax burden is highly concentrated, and that German income taxation has remained effectively p...

This paper deals with second-best pollution taxation by investigating allocations instead of the corresponding tax rates. Assuming certain restrictions on utility and that the marginal revenue from environmental taxation is positive, it is shown that environmental quality is higher in second best where only distortionary taxes are used to finance public expenditures than in the first-best optim...

This paper examines the utility gains and losses induced by changes in capital taxation in an economy with heterogeneous discount factors. A Ramsey equilibrium, where households earn wage income and accumulate capital, but may not borrow against future wage income, provides a natural setting for this analysis. In the short run, the agents with little or no capital gain from increased transfers ...

In a cross-border takeover, the tax base associated with future capital gains is transferred from target shareholders to acquirer shareholders. Cross-country differences in capital gains tax rates enable us to estimate the discount in the takeover price on account of future capital gains. The estimation suggests that a one percentage point increase in the capital gains tax rate reduces the valu...

This paper evaluates the quantitative impact of capital liberalization on the taxation structure and welfare of the liberalizing countries when governments conduct fiscal policy optimally but without commitment (time-consistent policies). The transition from a regime of capital autarky to a regime of free mobility leads to a decrease in the long-term tax rate on capital of 13 percent and an inc...

The present paper examines the historical evolution of China’s rural taxation system from the pre-reform period to the late 1990s. We propose that because of information asymmetry between the upper-level and the lower-level governments, local governments had to be granted some informal tax autonomy to fulfill the upper-level policy mandates. This easily led to excessive local informal taxation ...