There is often a gap between the prescriptions of an "optimal" tax system and actual tax systems, some of which can be neither efficient economically nor efficient at redistributing income. With a focus on personal income taxes, this paper reviews the political economics literature on tax...

The Dutch Parliament has passed legislation for a new income tax that abolishes the current tax on personal capital income and substitutes it by a presumptive capital income tax, which is in fact a net wealth tax. This paper contrasts this wealth tax with a conventional realization-based capital...

This paper begins with a survey of the literature on the political economy approaches to labor income taxation. We focus on recent progress made by examining in detail the specific properties of non-linear taxes derived in the context of voting. Next, we present new results on the existence of...

This study examines how tax system design and reform affect labor supply. We conduct an online experiment with 522 participants to assess labor responses to tax reforms that introduce or remove a notch, affecting after-tax income at either the lower or upper end of the income distribution. Our...

This paper explores the taxation of corporations in the wider context of capital income taxation. The pros and cons of various income-based and cash-flow forms of corporation tax (CT) are discussed. The paper concludes that the dual income tax (DIT), which taxes all capital income at the...

The semi-dual income tax typically combines a progressive tax schedule for labour and pension income with low and often flat and differentiated nominal tax rates on some forms of capital income. This paper discusses the rationale for the adoption of semi-dual income tax in the taxation of...

This article reviews the main technical and policy problems which the implementation of two formats of comprehensive solutions, discussed in the recent report by the Commission on Company Taxation in the Internal market would require. Both approaches imply the consolidation within the EU of net...

The German Income Tax Reform 2000, which announced a reduction in income tax rates to be implemented in a series of three stages, was welcomed by the public as a step towards unleashing lurking growth potentials. Nonetheless, in the course of the year 2001 a dispute arose, centering around the...

This paper proposes a growth-oriented dual-income tax by combining an allowance for corporate equity with a broadly defined flat tax on personal capital income. Revenue losses are compensated by an increase in the value added tax. The paper demonstrates the neutrality properties of the reform...

This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Pareto-improving tax reforms. The conditions can be expressed as sufficient statistics and have a wide range of potential applications in public finance. We discuss one such application in detail: the introduction of...