The Savings Directive has been celebrated as a major political break-through in coordinating taxation in Europe. Against this background, the present paper evaluates the real-world effects of this directive. The directive has left a loophole by providing grandfathering (exemption from...

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 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...

This paper studies optimal dynamic tax policy under the threat of political reform. A policy will be reformed ex post if a large enough political coalition supports reform; thus, sustainable policies are those that will continue to attract enough political support in the future. We find that...

There is a lack of clear evidence of the ways in which dividend taxation affects dividend distributions and investment since the evidence is based mainly on the behaviour of large listed companies. This paper utilises a large register-based panel data set, where the vast majority of firms are...

In this study we explore how a firm-level dividend tax on redistributed foreign profits affects the financial decisions of a multinational enterprise (MNE). We examine this by using evidence from a recent tax reform in Finland. The so-called equalization tax (EQT) used to be a regular element of...

When companies finance their investment via the international markets for stocks and bonds, relief from domestic personal taxes on dividends and capital gains will not reduce the cost of capital. Some authors have shown that even for small domestic companies whose shares are not traded...

Pension benefit rules depend on individual history far more than taxes do, and age plays a much larger role in pension determination than in tax determination. Apart from some simulation studies, theoretical studies of optimal tax design typically contain neither a mandatory pension system nor...

The gains in life expectancy are expected to double the dependency ratio and increase population by 10% in Switzerland until 2050. To quantify the effects on pensions, taxes and social contributions, we use an overlapping generations model with five margins of labor supply: labor market...