There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an 'optimal' tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be … reviews the political economics literature on tax systems and reforms to see whether political mechanisms allow us to better … understand why tax systems look the way they look. Finally, we exploit a database of reforms in labor taxation in the European …

It is generally argued that, in the context of Imperial Germany, public primary education was used to form “loyal … citizens” and to build a nation. In this paper we analyze to what extent central spending on primary education affected … category of expenditure are consistent with the role of indoctrination of public primary education …

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 as well as for endogenous government expenditures and irrespective of …

Most cities enjoy some autonomy over how they tax their residents, and that autonomy is typically exercised by multiple … review the literature on a number of salient features affecting local tax setting in an urban context. Urban local … governments on average raise some ten percent of total tax revenue in OECD countries and around half that share in non …

order to estimate the causal effects of general intergovernmental grants on local spending and local tax rates. The formula …-in, where federal grants are shifted to more local spending, but not to reduced local tax rates. Our results thus confirm a …

We present a conceptual framework for the analysis of politically feasible tax reforms. First, we prove a median voter … theorem for monotonic reforms of non-linear tax systems. This yields a characterization of reforms that are preferred by a … majority of individuals over the status quo and hence politically feasible. Second, we show that every Pareto-efficient tax …

households effectively face significantly lower average and marginal tax rates and lower progressivity than in the benchmark case … locating in low-tax jurisdictions. The results are stronger for singles than for families, indicating that singles are more … sensitive to spatial tax differentials than families. Although income tax schedules of the Swiss federation, the 26 cantons and …

We extend the literature on local income tax competition by allowing for inter-jurisdictional spillovers and imperfect …

. The sin good brings pleasure but has a detrimental effect on second period health and individuals tend to underestimate … this effect. In the second period, individuals can devote part of their saving to improve their health status and thus … period health care decision: either individuals acknowledge that they have made a mistake in the first period out of myopia …