This paper concerns optimal income taxation in a two-country OLG economy, where each country is characterized by asymmetric information between the government and the private sector, and where one of the countries outsources part of its production to the other. In the country whose firms...

Adaptation is omnipresent but people systematically fail to correctly anticipate the degree to which they adapt. This leads individuals to make inefficient intertemporal decisions. This paper concerns optimal income taxation to correct for such anticipation-biases in a framework where consumers...

The dual income tax provides the self-employed entrepreneur with huge incentives to participate in tax minimizing income shifting to have more of his income taxed as capital income. The Norwegian split model is designed to remove these incentives, but it contains loopholes. The present paper...

A Norwegian tax reform committee recently proposed a personal tax on the realized income from shares after deduction for an imputed risk-free rate of return. This paper describes the design of the proposed shareholder income tax and shows that it will be approximately neutral in several...

We study nonlinear income taxation in a Roy model in which agents' productivity is sectorspecific. We show that when income taxes can be sector-specific, the Diamond-Mirrlees theorem (according to which the second-best displays production efficiency) fails: social welfare (be it Rawlsian or...

The tax bias in favour of debt finance under the corporate income tax means that corporate debt ratios exceed the socially optimal level. This creates a rationale for thin-capitalization rules limiting the amount of debt that qualifies for interest deductibility. This paper sets up a model 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...

This paper studies the design of couples' income taxation. Consumption and labor supply decisions within the couple are made by maximizing a weighted sum of the spouses’ utilities; bargaining weights are given but specific to each couple. The information structure and labor supply decisions...