The economic changes associated with globalization tighten financial pressures on governments of high-income countries by increasing the demand for government spending while making it more costly to raise tax revenue. Greater international mobility of economic activity, and associated...

Following Meade (1978), we reconsider issues in the design of taxes on corporate income. We outline developments in economies and in economic thought over the last thirty years, and investigate how these developments should affect the design of taxes on corporate income. We consider a number of...

The merits of capital levies depend on the likelihood of repetition, the extent of anticipation, and its effects on distribution. The relevance of these features, which in varying degrees is underdeveloped or underappreciated in pertinent literatures, is elaborated and then considered with...

This paper compares marginal and average tax rates on working and saving under our current federal tax system with those that would arise under a federal retail sales tax, specifically the FairTax. The FairTax would replace the personal income, corporate income, payroll, and estate and gift...

We develop a theory of taxation and the distribution of government spending in a citizen-candidate model of legislatures. Individuals are heterogeneous in two dimensions: productive ability in the private sector and negotiating ability in politics. When these are positively correlated, rich...

We develop a general method to study the effects of non-linear taxation in dynamic settings using variational arguments. We first derive general theoretical formulas that characterize the welfare effects of local tax reforms and, in particular, the optimal tax system, potentially restricted...

This paper provides an asymmetric information analysis of the recent East Asian crisis. It then outlines several lessons from this crisis. First, there is a strong rationale for an international lender of last resort. Second, without appropriate conditionality for this lending, the moral hazard...

This paper studies the role of technology in local-government tax collection capacity in the developing world. We first conduct a new census of all local governments in Ghana to document a strong association between technology use and property tax billing, collection and enforcement. We then...

We show how to use field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and their associated high-level synthesis (HLS) compilers to solve heterogeneous agent models with incomplete markets and aggregate uncertainty (Krusell and Smith, 1998). We document that the acceleration delivered by one single FPGA is...

How has globalization affected the relative taxation of labor and capital, and why? To address this question we build and analyze a new database of effective macroeconomic tax rates covering 150 countries since 1965, constructed by combining national accounts data with government revenue...