Public finance has both normative and positive elements, and moving between theory and practice requires attention to help us understand both what policies government should adopt and whether it is likely to do so. We should not be surprised when bad policies are adopted in spite of better...

This paper analyses the sources of U.S. labour productivity growth in the late 1990s and presents projections for both output and labour productivity growth. We show that investment in information technology (IT) played a substantial role in the U.S. productivity revival and that similar trends...

The relative constancy of non-financial corporate tax revenues as a share of US GDP masks offsetting trends in the ratio of corporate profits to GDP (declining) and the average tax rate (increasing). The average tax rate rose steadily between 1996 and 2003, an increase largely attributable to...