This paper studies corporate tax competition if it is costly to learn some of the elements that determine the e¤ective tax burden. Search cost may, but need not, eliminate the tax competition pressure. The outcome depends on the boundaries of tax rate and tax base choices. Search cost can explain the empirically observed tax cuts cum base broadening. Keywords: Costly search, tax competition, co...

This text surveys the literature on the implications of international capital mobility for national tax policies. Our main issue for consideration in this survey is whether taxation of income, specifically capital income will survive, how border crossing investment is taxed relative to domestic investment and whether welfare gains can be achieved through international tax coordination. Our anal...

I quantitatively study the optimal capital income taxation in the general equilibrium overlapping generations model with uninsurable idiosyncratic income shocks and with housing and flnancial assets. Following key characteristics of housing are explicitly modeled: (i) housing is held for the dual purpose of consumption and savings, (ii) housing can be either owned or rented, (iii) if owned, hou...

The historical evolution of the corporate tax burden in the OECD nations is studied, beginning with an assessment of alternative measures of the burden. Descriptive analysis of these time series reveals no evidence of a competitive “race to the bottom” in capital taxation, and little evidence of even a harmonization of the tax burden. These conclusions for the OECD and Europe as a whole are con...

When capital taxes are used to finance a public good, capital mobility reduces efficiency since it narrows the tax base. This motivates the concern that capital mobility might also interfere with unilateral efforts to provide the public good of environmental quality through pollution taxes. I show in this paper that capital mobility does not affect efficiency in a small open economy, even thoug...

We examine cross-region capital mobility in China and track how the degree of mobility has changed over time. The effects of fiscal and redistributive activities of different levels of government in China on private capital mobility are taken into account. Our results indicate that there is a significant improvement in capital mobility over time in China, particularly for private capital in the...

Chapter Outline Designing Broad-Based Taxes: The Economic Objectives 171 Ability to Pay: Theoretical Considerations 173 Two Preliminary Considerations 173 Horizontal Equity 174 From Horizontal Equity to the Ideal Tax Base 174 The Three Principles of Tax Design 174 People Bear the Tax Burden 174 Individuals Sacrifice Utility 174 The Ideal Tax Base as the Best Surrogate Measure of Utility 175 Hai...

We set up a two-period model, where individuals finance educational investment and first-period consumption by borrowing against risky second-period labor income. We show that the government should use both education subsidies and capital taxation to mitigate distortions, stemming from social insurance through labor taxation, and we derive a Ramsey-rule for the optimal combination of these inst...

Existing literature focuses on how corporate taxation affects firms’ investment decisions by altering after-tax returns. This paper instead examines how corporate taxation affects investment by reducing the cash flow a firm has available to invest in the current period. I use a sharp nonlinearity in the mapping from pre-tax profitability to taxes created by the tax loss carryforward feature of ...

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...