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...

This paper examines information sharing between governments in an optimal taxation framework. We present a taxonomy of alternative systems of international capital income taxation and characterize the choice of tax rates and information exchange. The model reproduces the conclusion of the previous literature that integration of international capital markets may lead to the under-provision of pu...

We consider an environment in which agents’ skills are private information and follow arbitrary stochastic processes. We prove that it is typically Pareto optimal for an individual’s marginal benefit of investing in capital to exceed his marginal cost of doing so. This wedge is consistent with a positive tax on capital income. We also prove that it is Pareto optimal for the marginal rate of sub...

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 ...

This paper develops a theoretical model of corporate taxation in the presence of …nancially integrated multinational …rms. Under the assumption that multinational …rms at least partly use internal loans to …nance foreign investment, we …nd that the optimal corporate tax rate is positive from the perspective of a small, open economy. This …nding contrasts the standard result that the optimal sou...

This paper shows that there is a presumption that Pareto efficient taxation entails a positive tax on capital. When tax and expenditure policies can affect the market distribution of income, those effects need to be taken into account, reducing the burden imposed on distortionary redistribution. The paper extends the 1976 Atkinson-Stiglitz results to a dynamic, overlapping generations model, co...

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...