This paper reviews the literature on optimal taxation of labour income and the empirical work on labour supply and the elasticity of taxable income in Sweden. It also presents an overview of Swedish taxation of labour income, offers calculations on the development in effective marginal tax rates...

There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an optimal tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax systems...

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...

This paper analyzes the optimal tax system consisting of the tax rate and the capacity of the tax administration. I challenge the conventional wisdom that tax rates and tax administrations' capacity are complements showing that their relationship depends on a country's level of development....

A widespread objection to the introduction of consumption tax systems claims that this would lead to high tax revenue losses. This paper investigates the revenue effects of a consumption tax reform in Germany. Our results suggest that the revenue losses would be surprisingly low. We find a...

The paper studies the revenue, efficiency, and distributional implications of a simple strategy of offsetting tariff reductions with increases in destination-based consumption taxes so as to leave consumer prices unchanged. We employ a dynamic micro-founded macroeconomic model of a small open...

The standard tax theory result that investment should not be distorted is based on the assumption that profits are locally bound. In this paper we analyze the optimal tax policy when firms are internationally mobile. We show that the optimal policy response to increasing firm mobility may be...

We analyze the implications of the decline in labor’s share in national income for optimal Ramsey taxation. It is optimal to accompany the decline in labor share by raising capital taxes only if the labor share is falling because of a decline in competition or other mechanisms that raise the...

There is increasing empirical evidence that people systematically differ in their rates of return on capital. We derive optimal non-linear taxes on labor and capital income in the presence of such return heterogeneity. We allow for two distinct reasons why returns are heterogeneous: because...

This paper shows that capital-skill complementarity provides a quantitatively significant rationale to tax capital for redistributive governments. The optimal capital income tax rate is 60%, which is significantly higher than the optimal rate of 48% in an identically calibrated model without...