the regressive nature of consumption taxes poses a challenge to partisan theory. using data for up to 20 oecd countries in the period 1970-2003 this article aims to explore the question of whether the idea that social democratic governments typically have to compromise on policy goals and core constituency interests to make themselves more appealing to the median voter necessitates the use of r...

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Deadweight loss Tax policy in a small open economy The paper develops a simple general equilibrium framework for calculating the marginal deadweight loss from taxation in a small open economy. The framework allows a decomposition of the deadweight loss from each tax instrument into the losses stemming from the contraction of the different tax bases. The paper des...

In contrast to prior disaggregated product level studies on tariff evasion which have focused on select country pairs, we develop a model that allows us to consistently estimate average tariff evasion effects on aggregate bilateral trade data. This has two distinct advantages over prior work. We are able to obtain a more general test for average tariff evasion effects across a large number of c...

It is well known that some XML elements correspond to objects (in the sense of object-orientation) and others do not. The question we consider in this paper is what benefits we can derive from paying attention to such object semantics, particularly for the problem of keyword queries. Keyword queries against XML data have been studied extensively in recent years, with several lowest-common-ances...

When accidental bequests signal otherwise unobservable individual characteristics such as productivity and longevity, the population should be partitioned into two groups: those who do not receive an inheritance those who do. The …rst tagged group gets a second-best tax à la Mirrlees; the second group, when its type is fully revealed, a …rst-best tax schedule. Receiving an inheritance makes hig...