An important question is whether VAT exemption of financial services is a desirable property or whether it is justified only due to practical and administrative necessity. This paper singles out a number of financial services for discussion of this issue in a context allowing for other taxes and...

Should we exempt the services of insurance companies from VAT? Addressing this issue, the paper distinguishes between insurance against a general loss of resources and a loss of a specific commodity (property insurance). There is a case for exempting the former kind of insurance, but not the...

Dynamic modeling of demand for goods whose cumulated stocks enter an intertemporal utility function as latent variables, is discussed. The issues include: how represent addiction, how handle unobserved expectations and changing plans, how deal with `dynamic inconsistency'? Arguments are put...

The appropriate way of quantifying how taxation of a firm's income and capital can distort its optimizing conditions is a recurring issue in the literature on optimal taxation. Exponential decay, although empirically contested, is almost ubiquitous. In the present paper a generalized framework...

The Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) is discussed for handling the joint occurrence of fixed effects and random measurement errors in an autoregressive panel data model. Finite memory of disturbances, latent regressors and measurement errors is assumed. Two specializations of GMM are...

In the paper is considered identification of coefficients in equations explaining a continuous variable, say the number of sickness absence days of an individual per year, by cohort, time and age, subject to their definitional identity. Extensions of a linear equation to polynomials, including...

Identification of equations explaining a continuous variable, e.g., the length of sickness absence spells, by age, cohort and time (ACT), subject to their definitional identity is reconsidered. Various extensions of a linear equation to polynomials are explored. If no interactions between the...

The measurement error problem in linear time series regression, with focus on the impact of error memory, modeled as nite-order MA processes, is considered. Three prototype models, two bivariate and one univariate ARMA, and ways of handling the problem by using instrumental variables (IVs) are...