Marginal income taxes may have an insurance effect by decreasing the effective fluctuations of after-tax individual income. By compressing the idiosyncratic component of personal income fluctuations, higher marginal taxes should be negatively correlated with the dispersion of consumption across...

For patriotic citizens, living in their native country is intrinsically preferable compared to living in the diaspora. In this paper, we analyze the implications of such a patriotic lock-in in a world with international migration and redistributive taxation. In a formal model of redistribution...

Evidence on the price elasticity of private donations to charities and on the crowding out effect of donations by government grants suggests that a redirection of government funds from tax incentives for giving towards direct grants could increase total charity funding. This raises the question...

The Droit de Suite, known in the UK as Artists’ Resale Rights, provides an artist with the inalienable right to receive a royalty based on the resale price of an original work of art. This paper provides an empirical analysis of actual changes in the UK auction market for art that is subject...

Even relatively poor people oppose high rates of redistribution because of the anticipation that they, or their children, may move up the income ladder. This ‘Prospect of Upward Mobility’ (POUM) hypothesis is commonly advanced to explain why democracies do not engage in large-scale...

Economists tend to agree that international trade liberalization brings significant gains from trade to countries engaging in such a process. At the same time however, public opinion is much less optimistic and there is a widespread concern that the current sharing of the gains from trade is...

We analyse the question of optimal taxation in a dual economy, when the policy-maker is concerned about the distribution of labour income. Income inequality is caused by the presence of sunk capital investments, which creates a ‘good jobs’ sector due to the capture of quasi-rents by trade...

The Paper reviews the literature on these tax incentives, with special focus on long-term saving, housing, and household liabilities. The Paper addresses several areas of policy intervention: (1) the interest rate effect on personal saving; (2) the effect of tax incentives on long-term mandatory...

Almost all the literature on tax competition in the presence of multinationals (MNCs) and profit shifting ignores trade costs. This Paper studies how economic integration, in terms of reduced trade costs and internationalization of ownership, affects tax competition and equilibrium corporate...

Tax evasion, by its very nature, is difficult to observe. In this Paper, we present a case study of tax evasion in China. The novel feature of our approach is that at a very disaggregated level of individual products, we can measure evasion relatively precisely, by comparing the values that...