The Ramsey approach to optimal taxation and Ramsey tax rules have amassed substance in economic theory. However, they are often criticized on grounds of practicality, fairness, feasibility and some other aspects of designing actual tax policy. This paper presents a collection of these views; it...

State governments finance their expenditures with multiple tax instruments, so when collections from one source decline, they are typically compensated by greater revenues from other sources. This paper addresses the important question of the extent to which personal and corporate income taxes...

This paper examines the optimal (first-best) fiscal policy in a stochastic representative agent model that exhibits a ``keeping up with the Joneses'' utility function and imperfectly competitive product markets. We find that the optimal labor tax is a constant, whose sign is determined by the...

We give two procedures for determining whether efficient Pareto improving local changes are possible. When they are, the procedures compute for them. Any procedure generating efficient and Pareto improving changes can be replicated by these procedures. The two programs form a striking duality....

This paper addresses the reduction of market failure under imperfect competition. It proposes a taxscheme that provides firms with an incentive to forgo their market power: Firms optimize after-tax profits. Now simply consider a firm´s gross profit margin the unique tax-rate it is charged on...

Economists traditionally tackle normative problems by computing optimal policy, i.e., the one that maximizes a social welfare function. In practice, however, a succession of marginal changes to a limited number of policy instruments are implemented, until no further improvement is feasible. I...

Differential tax analysis is used to show how the socially optimal fiscal-tax to liquidity-tax ratio changes with the relative size of the tax-evading hidden economy. The smaller the relative size of the hidden economy, the larger the optimal fiscal-tax to liquidity-tax ratio. The empirical...

It has been argued in the literature that, interjurisdictional competition forces the public sector to increase its efficiency and thus helps to tame Leviathan governments. The paper addresses this hypothesis by means of a simple taxcompetition model with a Leviathan state. It is seen that the...

This paper examines the empirical relevance of the double dividend of revenue neutral marginal environmental tax reforms. For this purpose we use an extended version of the Ahmad-Stern model of indirect taxation. This version includes environmental externalities. We estimate the key parameters...

The paper discusses the applicability of optimal taxation theory to source-based capital incomes when significant tax evasion is observed. Without tax evasion a modified Ramsey Rule may reduce distortions brought by international capital mobility, leading to levying differentiated tax rates in...