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 certainty....

In this paper we offer an analysis of the effects of uncertainty about future tax policy on irreversible investment. The main message of the paper is that investment is not much affected by the degreee of tax policy uncertainty. This is true regardless of whether random tax changes are...

How does economic uncertainty affect the impact of tax policy? We exploit a natural experiment in which two very similar investment subsidies were implemented in the same country, two years apart: once during a period of economic stability, and once during a period of very high uncertainty....

The standard model of strategic tax competition assumes that government policymakers are perfectly benevolent, acting solely to maximize the utility of the representative resident in their jurisdiction. We depart from this assumption by allowing for the possibility that policymakers also may be...

The paper examines the question how fiscally strong and fiscally weak states respond to taxing autonomy at the state level, a subject that is currently under debate in Germany where states do have virtually no power to tax. We use a simple theoretical model that incorporates state surtaxes on...

Assuming a two-period model with endogenous choices of labour, education, and saving, it is shown to be second-best efficient to deviate from Ramsey's Rule and to distort qualified labour less than nonqualified labour. The result holds for arbitrary utility and learning functions. Efficient...