There is a strong case for arguing that, in contradiction to some traditional arguments in public economics, capital income should be taxed, though not necessarily under the same rate schedule as labour earnings. The Dual Income Taxation (DIT) system consists of two parallel piecewise linear tax schedules, in which that for capital income has a zero lower bracket rate and an upper bracket rate ...

Recently, several papers have re-examined the so called production efficiency theorem and the Atkinson and Stiglitz theorem on commodity taxes in the optimal taxation literature. Naito (1998) showed that indirect redistribution through production distortion or consumption distortion can Pareto-improve welfare and that the two theorems do not necessarily hold when different factors are imperfect...

This paper studies the effects of capital taxation in a dynamic heterogeneous-agent economy with uninsurable entrepreneurial risk. Although it allows for rich general-equilibrium effects and a stationary distribution of wealth, the model is highly tractable. This permits a clear analysis, not only of the steady state, but also of the entire transitional dynamics following any change in tax poli...

Ce papier analyse les problèmes liés à l’implémentation du schéma Equal Labour Income Equalisation (ELIE) proposé par Kolm (2005). Il étudie successivement l’influence de l’incertitude dans la connaisance des revenus indivduels, l’impact des échelles d’équivalence et finalement les conséquences de l’accumulation du capital. Si l’incertitude ne modifie pas fondamentalement les propriétés d’équit...

This paper asks how good actual US-fiscal policy was on average and over the cycle in the last 40 years compared to a Ramsey-optimal policy of a frictional labor market model. In our model labor taxes are intertemporally distortive, making the trade-off between capital and labor taxes interesting. Quantitatively, (optimal) taxation results hinge upon an estimate of the intratemporal elasticity ...

This paper introduces “capital ownership neutrality” (CON) and “national ownership neutrality” (NON) as benchmarks for evaluating the desirability of international tax reforms, and applies them to analyze recent U.S. tax reform proposals. Tax systems satisfy CON if they do not distort the ownership of capital assets, which promotes global efficiency whenever the productivity of an investment di...

Bilateral international tax treaties govern the host country taxation for the vast majority of the world’s foreign direct investment (FDI). Of particular interest is the fact that the tax rates used under these treaties are gradually falling although the treaties themselves do not specify any such reductions. Since there is no outside governing agency to redress treaty violations, such reductio...

This paper compares property taxation to a corporate income tax based on formula apportionment in a model where identical countries compete to attract capital. We find that if countries can pair a residence-based capital tax with a property tax (source tax on capital) the tax equilibrium is efficient. In contrast, the use of a 2-factor FA scheme based on sales and capital combined with a reside...