Atkinson and Stiglitz show that with weakly separability, differential commodity taxes are unnecessary given an optimal nonlinear income tax. Deaton showed that with an optimal linear progressive income tax, commodity taxes are superfluous under weakly separable and linear Engel curves. Using...

Pension benefit rules depend on individual history far more than taxes do, and age plays a much larger role in pension determination than in tax determination. Apart from some simulation studies, theoretical studies of optimal tax design typically contain neither a mandatory pension system nor...

Sweden reached the 2007 OECD average level of female labor force participation already in 1974. Before, but not after, 1971 the average tax rate facing the housewife was a function of the income of her husband. By exploiting a rich register based data source I utilize the exogenous variation...

This paper analyses the effectiveness of the corporate income tax as an automatic stabilizer. It employs a unique firm-level dataset of German manufacturers combining financial statements with firm-specific information about credit market restrictions. The results show that approximately 20 per...

This paper analyzes the relevance of firm losses for tax revenues and welfare when switching from separate accounting to a system of tax base consolidation with formula apportionment. We find that a system change unambiguously decreases tax revenues in the short run, in which neither firms nor...

We derive a sufficient statistics optimal income tax formula in a general model that incorporates unemployment and endogenous wages, to study the shape of the tax and transfer system at the bottom of the income distribution. The sufficient statistics are the macro employment response to taxation...

Inheritance taxes may induce heirs to discontinue family firms. Because firm dissolution incurs transaction costs, a preferential tax treatment of transferred family businesses seems to be desirable from a macroeconomic viewpoint. The support of dynastic succession, however, entails also a cost...

The well-known Johansson-Samuelson Theorem proves that, in partial equilibrium, comprehensive income taxation with a uniform tax rate is neutral in terms of investment decisions, if fiscal depreciation allowances coincide with economic depreciation. In this article we show that this result does...

In this paper, we use an exogenous variation in tax regulations to analyze the impact of bonus depreciation programs on business investment. To promote economic convergence of Eastern and Western Germany after reunification, bonus depreciation tax incentives were granted for investments in...

Several recent studies show that the elasticity of taxable income (ETI) is not a sufficient statistic for the welfare costs of taxation due to factors such as taxbase shifting. This paper provides an additional argument demonstrating the non-sufficiency of the ETI, namely tax deductions....