There is ample evidence that internal capital markets incur efficiency costs for multinational enterprises (MNEs). This paper analyzes whether tax avoidance behavior interacts with the costs of running an internal capital market and how policies of competing governments respond to it. We show...

The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This paper examines the validity of this claim in an optimal income tax framework. Contrary to the recommendation...

We show that an insight from taxation theory allows identification of both the supply and demand elasticities with only one instrument. Ramsey (1928) and subsequent models of taxation assume that a tax levied on the demand side only affects demand through the price after taxation....

We augment a standard tax model by concerns about tax equity: people get upset when labour is taxed more heavily than capital. Even the slightest concern for tax equity invalidates the common recommendation for small open economies that capital should remain tax-exempt. This holds for exogenous...

This paper investigates the conditions under which partial harmonization for capital taxation is sustained in a repeated interactions model of tax competition when there are three heterogenous countries with respect to their capital endowments. We show that regardless of the structure of the...

This paper presents the case for tax progressivity based on recent results in optimal tax theory. We consider the optimal progressivity of earnings taxation and whether capital income should be taxed. We critically discuss the academic research on these topics and when and how the results can be...

This paper studies the aggregate and distributional implications of Markov-perfect tax-spending policy in a neoclassical growth model with capitalists and workers. Focusing on the long run, our main findings are: (i) it is optimal for a benevolent government, which cares equally about its...

This note demonstrates that optimal tax calculations in overlapping generations models should not be based exclusively on long-run welfare changes. As the latter represent a mix of efficiency and intergenerational redistribution effects, they typically favor policies which redistribute towards...

The tax competition for mobile capital, in particular the reluctance of small countries to agree on measures of tax coordination, has ongoing political and economic fallouts within Europe. We analyse the effects of introducing a two tier structure of capital taxation, where the asymmetric member...

Capital tax competition is known to result in inefficiently low tax rates and an undersupply of public goods. The provision of public goods and with it the welfare of all countries can be enhanced via tax coordination. Based on the standard Zodrow-Mieszkowski-Wilson tax-competition model this...