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...

This paper discusses capital gains taxation on movable property in Switzerland which was completely abolished at the canton level in 1996 but is now under political discussion as a tax at the confederation level. Economic reasoning on the features of the Swiss tax system and empirical results for canton data on the capital gains tax in the past suggest that such a tax has a negative effect on r...

This paper analyzes the impact of pollution and abatement policy within a stochastic endogenous growth model. The agents have environmental preferences, but they neglect their individual contribution to aggregate abatement. Therefore, environmental care is done by the government and financed via income taxation and government bonds. Equilibrium growth depends on environmental preferences, perce...

According to conventional wisdom internationally mobile capital should not be taxed or should be taxed at a lower rate than labour. An important underlying assumption behind this view is that there are no market imperfections, in particular that labour markets clear competitively. At least for Europe, which has been suffering from high unemployment for a long time, this assumption does not seem...

Dividends are taxed at both the corporate and personal levels in the United States. This double taxation of dividends may distort investment efficiency. Partly motivated by this consideration, the US Congress enacted the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act (JGTRRA) in 2003. This act reduced the tax rates on dividends and capital gains, and eliminated the wedge between these two tax ra...

To understand the role of evidence in tax policy design, this paper organizes the empirical analysis of reform under five loosely related headings: (i) key margins of adjustment, (ii) measurement of effective tax rates, (iii) the importance of information and complexity, (iv) evidence on the size of responses, and (v) implications from theory for tax design. The context for the discussion is th...

In this paper, we study optimal tax policy in a dynamic private information economy. We describe efficient allocations and competitive equilibria. The standard assumption in the literature is that trades are observable by all agents. We show that in such an environment the competitive equilibrium is efficient and that government consumption can be financed by lump-sum taxation. We go on to cons...

We consider a Rebelo (1991) type model of endogenous growth in which the environmental quality positively affects the rate of human capital accumulation and the environmental quality itself is positively affected by human capital accumulation and is negatively affected by physical capital accumulation. We analyse the effects of taxation on the steady state equilibrium growth rate in this model....

In this section we introduce a framework to study optimal linear capital taxation. We first focus on a two-period model, define the concept of intertemporal wedge and derive optimal capital taxes using the Atkinson Stiglitz result. We then move to an infinite horizon model with aggregate uncertainty and derive optimal taxes. Finally, we study a model with capitalists and workers and show that o...

This thesis studies the macroeconomics of incomplete markets. Chapter 1 studies the effects of capital taxation in a dynamic heterogeneous-agent economy with uninsurable entrepreneurial risk. Unlike either the complete-markets paradigm or Bewley-type models where idiosyncratic risk impacts only labor income, here it is shown that capital taxation may actually stimulate capital accumulation. Thi...