An income tax is equivalent to a uniform tax on all expenditures, including expenditures on commodity tax payments. This will compound the tax being applied to any taxed commodity. In the presence of an income tax, therefore, any expenditure tax (including a pollution tax) will produce a higher effective tax than its nominal tax rate would suggest. For example, a nominal Pigouvian tax applied t...

We show in a two-period world with endogenous savings and two assets, one of them exhibiting a stochastic return that an interest adjusted income tax is optimal. This tax leaves a safe component of interest income tax free and taxes the excess return with a special tax rate. There is no trade off between risk allocation and efficiency in intertemporal consumption. Both goals are reached. As the...

This paper provides formulas for optimal top marginal tax rates when couples are taxed according to income splitting between spouses, consumption is taxed, and the skill distribution is unbounded. Optimal top marginal income tax rates are computed for Germany using a dataset that includes the tax returns of all German top taxpayers. We find that the optimal top marginal tax rate converges to ab...

This paper quantitatively investigates the optimal capital income taxation in the general equilibrium overlapping generations model, which incorporates characteristics of housing and the U.S. preferential tax treatment for owner-occupied housing. Housing tax policy is found to have a substantial effect on how capital income should be taxed. Given the U.S. preferential tax treatment for owner-oc...

It has recently been shown that incorporating “keeping up with the Joneses”preferences into a prototypical two-ability-type optimal nonlinear income tax model leads to higher marginal tax rates for both types of agents. In particular, the high-skill type faces a positive marginal tax rate, rather than zero as in the conventional case. In this paper, agents’utility functions are postulated to ex...

Any tax system imposing selective commodity taxation must have procedures for assigning different goods to tax rate categories. Real-world tax legislation does this on the basis of observable characteristics, allowing the tax system to handle a constantly evolving set of available goods. We recast the theory of optimal taxation in the language of characteristics using the Gorman-Lancaster model...

The U.S. tax law taxes a multinational firm (MNF)’s global incomes at its home country tax rate. To avoid double taxation, it permits tax cross-crediting. Namely, the global firm can use excess foreign tax credits (FTCs) (the portion of foreign tax payments that exceed the home country tax liabilities) generated from a subsidiary located in a high-tax country to offset the tax liabilities of it...

The U.S. tax law taxes a multinational firm (MNF)’s global incomes at its home country tax rate. To avoid double taxation, it permits tax cross-crediting. Namely, the global firm can use excess foreign tax credits (FTCs) (the portion of foreign tax payments that exceed the home country tax liabilities) generated from a subsidiary located in a high-tax country to offset the tax liabilities of it...