This paper examines the role of international tax evasion for the choice of an optimal foreign tax credit by a capital exporting region. Since a foreign tax credit raises the opportunity cost of concealing foreign source income, it can be employed to discourage evasion activity. The existence of...

This paper examines the implications of increasing returns-to-scale evasion technologies for the optimal structure of commodity taxes. We find that, in the presence of evasion, tax design should aim at inducing uniform marginal evasion responses across commodities. This objective may dominate...

The reason why the social contract is so different in two otherwise comparable societies like the United States and continental Western European countries represents a challenging question. Large empirical evidence shows that the difference in the political support for redistribution appears to...

This paper explores how to optimally set tax and transfers when taxation authorities : (1) are uninformed about individuals’ value of time in both market and non-market activities and (2) can observe both market-income and time allocated to market employment. In contrast to much of the optimal...

We consider a setting in which capital taxation is characterized by two distortions working in opposite directions. On one hand, governments engage in tax competition and are tempted to lower capital tax rates. On the other hand, they are unable to commit to future policies and, once capital has...

This paper explores how to optimally set tax and transfers when taxation authorities : (1) are uninformed about individuals’ value of time in both market and non-market activities and (2) can observe both market-income and time allocated to market employment. We show that optimal...

In an earlier paper [Blackorby and Murty; 2007] we showed that if a monopoly sector is imbedded in a general equilibrium framework and profits are taxed at one hundred percent, then unit (specific) taxation and ad valorem taxation are welfare-wise equivalent. In this paper, we consider private...

This paper proposes a general framework for analyzing commodity tax competition under destination and origin principles, based on three possible tax spillovers, the consumer price spillover, the producer price/terms of trade spillover, and rent spillovers. A model is presented which can be...

This paper explores how to optimally set tax and transfers when taxation authorities : (1) are uninformed about individuals’ value of time in both market and non-market activities and (2) can observe both market-income and time allocated to market employment. In contrast to much of the optimal...

It has realized since Pigou (1947) that if public goods are financed by distortionary taxation, the marginal social cost of providing the public good will exceed the actual resource cost by the marginal deadweight cost of taxation.