Most governments will have to raise additional resources to deal with the aftermath of the corona crisis. This paper argues that excise duties on drinking, smoking, gambling, sugar-sweetened beverages, plastics, fossil fuels, motoring, telecoms and platforms are the preferred instruments. In...

Tax law is often uncertain. In particular, the use of tax shelters tends to be in the “grey area” between illegal tax evasion and legal tax avoidance. In this paper I show that uncertainty in tax law can help achieve higher efficiency than allowing or disallowing a tax shelter with...

We exploit the 2017 US tax reform to learn about the tax-competitiveness of US multinational corporations (MNCs) relative to their international peers. Matching on the propensity score, we compare pairs of similar US and European firms listed on the S&P500 or StoxxEurope600 in a...

Many countries are currently debating whether to reduce or eliminate taxes on feminine hygiene products as a measure to address “period poverty” and promote gender equality. Legislators often reject proposals involving reforms of “tampon taxes” as the pass-through of sales taxes into...

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....

In West Africa, the Value Added Tax (VAT) policy consists of a uniform tax rate, but several items consumed by rich and poor households, are exempted. We provide an optimal tax framework to reflect on the welfare effects of such a tariff structure, in the context of current debates on domestic...

This paper examines the effect of taxes on the individuals? choices of educational direction, and thus on the economy's skill composition. A proportional labour income tax induces too many workers with high innate ability to choose an educational type with high consumption value and low effort...

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...

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...

Large and growing levels of public debt in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Euro Area raise new interest in the cross-country effects of a large open economy's deficits. We consider a dynamic optimising model with costly tax collection and exogenously given public spending and...