This paper studies optimal dynamic tax policy under the threat of political reform. A policy will be reformed ex post if a large enough political coalition supports reform; thus, sustainable policies are those that will continue to attract enough political support in the future. We find that optimal marginal capital taxes are either progressive or U-shaped, so that savings are subsidized for th...

How do taxes affect human capital accumulation? This question has been studied extensively in the context of two model classes: overlapping generations (OLG) and infinite horizon (IH) models. These embody very different assumptions about the intergenerational transmission of physical and human capital. OLG models typically abstract from intergenerational linkages, while IH models implicitly ass...

The paper considers governments' public procurement decision as a way of influencing industry structure. In a federation in which capital is mobile and capital taxation is harmonized, a home bias in public procurement can potentially be explained as an effort to increase the capital intensity of local production and to attract taxable capital. As a result, governments may prefer domestic firms ...

Viability theory is the study of dynamical systems that asks “what is the set of initial conditions that generate evolutions, which obey the laws of motion of a system plus other constraints, for the length of the evolution”. We apply viability theory to Judd’s (JPE, 1987) dynamic tax model to identify which economic states are viable, in that the application of annually constrained tax-rate ad...

This paper proposes a new scheme of personal income taxation that would eliminate inefficiencies arising from differences in the tax treatment of investments in intangible human capital and other types of capital formation. It also would offset the exacerbation of those distortions due to progressive income taxation, without requiring the latter’s abandonment. The tax regime proposed here would...

The past academic literature on tax policy has focused almost entirely on the analysis of tax structures in the richest countries, particularly the U.S. Overall the optimal tax models explain reasonably well the observed tax policies in these countries. As summarized in Gordon (2000), for example, past theoretical work suggests that taxes on consumption or labor income should dominate use of ca...

The past academic literature on tax policy has focused almost entirely on the analysis of tax structures in the richest countries, particularly the U.S. Overall the optimal tax models explain reasonably well the observed tax policies in these countries. As summarized in Gordon (2000), for example, past theoretical work suggests that taxes on consumption or labor income should dominate use of ca...