The paper presents a general method for estimating a country's level of fundamental house prices and its interaction with actual house prices. We set up a unified empirical model which can be used to analyze the time-series behavior of the fundamental house price and to test various hypotheses...

The theory of optimal taxation has often been criticized for being of little practical policy relevance, due to a lack of robust theoretical results. This paper argues that recent advances in optimal tax theory has made that theory easier to apply and may help to explain some current trends in...

During the early 1990s the Nordic countries undertook a series of sweeping tax reforms. These reforms combined ambitious base-broadening measures with the introduction of the so-called dual income tax which systematically separates the taxation of labour income from the taxation of capital...

Tax competition for mobile capital can undermine the attempts of governments to redistribute income from rich to poor. I study whether international tax coordination can alleviate this problem, using a general equilibrium model synthesizing recent contributions to the tax competition literature....

A Norwegian tax reform committee recently proposed a personal tax on the realized income from shares after deduction for an imputed risk-free rate of return. This paper describes the design of the proposed shareholder income tax and shows that it will be approximately neutral in several...

The paper discusses the recent drive towards a system of dual income taxation (DIT) in the Nordic countries. The pure version of this system combines progressive taxation of labour and transfer incomes with a proportional tax on income from capital at a level equal to the corporate income tax...