Competition among regional governments may lead to suboptimal levels of capital taxation, as governments ignore the external benefits of capital flight to other regions. However, there have been few attempts to quantify the magnitude of the resulting efficiency losses. This paper presents extensive calculations of the efficiency costs over a wide range of parameter scenarios and assumptions abo...

Random taxation may be optimal when the tax payers differ in their attitudes towards risk, so that tax randomization enables the government to separate agents who otherwise would have been pooled. The paper provides conditions under which randomization is optimal, both characterizing circumstances where local random deviations are improving in a neighborhood of a non random optimum, and giving ...

This paper proposes a simple model for understanding transaction costs – their composition, size and policy implications. We distinguish between investments in institutions that facilitate exchange and the cost of conducting exchange itself. Institutional quality and market size are determined by the decisions of risk averse agents and conditions are discussed under which the efficient allocati...

This paper shows that stricter enforcement may increase tax evasion. Individuals vote on a linear income tax which is used to finance lump sum transfers. Stricter enforcement may make redistributive taxation more attractive to the decisive voter. The tax rate and transfer may rise which in turn may increase tax evasion. An example shows that this result can actually occur. The paper also discus...

In this paper fiscal policy is examined for an open economy characterised by unemployment due to efficiency wages. We allow for capital and firm mobility in a model where the government chooses the level of wage, source-based capital and profit taxation. The taxing choices of governments are analyzed in scenarios which differ with respect to the constraints imposed on the set of available taxes...

This paper studies the role of family size in the design of optimal income taxation. We consider a second best setting where the government observes the number of children and the income of the parents but not their productivity. With a linear tax schedule the marginal tax rate is shown to decrease with the number of children, while the relationship between the demogrant and family size appears...

The aim of this paper is to make a first step towards studying the role of social expenditure and its interaction with corporate taxation in determining the destination of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows. Using panel data for 18 OECD countries and measuring the extent of social welfare policies by the (public social expenditure)/GDP ratio, we find strong support for the conjecture that re...

This paper studies differences in inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences between East and West Germany. As expected, there are substantial differences with respect to all three of these measures. Surprisingly, however, differences in distributional norms are much smaller than differences with respect to inequality perceptions or redistributive preferences. ...

This paper examines the impact of US income and payroll taxes on the decision of wage-and-salary employees to become self-employed. I exploit variations in the tax treatment of wage and self-employment income using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Results show that differential taxation has significant effects on the probability of making a transition into self-employment. Reducing an indivi...

Since Adam Smith, most economists have held that a professional army is superior to a conscript army, thanks to benefiting from comparative advantage and specialization. We summarize recent literature on the benefits and costs of military draft, with a special emphasis on its dynamic effects on human capital formation. Empirical evidence refutes the claim that the economic costs of the draft wo...