Artiklen gennemgår de teoretiske begrundelser for at beskatte ejendomsværdier og grundværdier. Vi finder, at der er et argument for at beskatte ejendomsværdien som et middel til at modvirke de forvridninger, som især beskatningen af kapitalindkomst medfører. Endvidere viser vi, at en skat...

The so-called “fiscal policy approach" predicts that increases in income skewness should be associated with an intensification of redistributive efforts, at least in democracies. If redistribution is detrimental to growth, then this implies that a poor middle class is bad for long-run...

The coincidence of banking and currency crises associated with the Asian financial crisis has drawn renewed attention to causal and common factors linking the two phenomena. In this paper, we analyze the incidence and underlying causes of banking and currency crises in 90 industrial and...

This paper establishes, in a very general setting, necessary and sufficient conditions for harmonization of economic policies to be welfare-improving. As an application, it is shown that under circumstances in which harmonization is known to be welfare-improving when taxes are levied on a...

Advances in information technology have improved the administrative feasibility of redistribution based on lifetime earnings recorded at the time of retirement. We study optimal lifetime income taxation and social insurance in an economy in which redistributive taxation and social insurance...

The literature suggests that the concern for economic efficiency calls for individual-based taxation of married couples with a higher rate on the primary earner. This paper reconsiders the choice of tax unit in the Becker model of household production. Our aim is to study the robustness of...

This paper studies whether a benevolent government should use workfare as part of its unemployment benefit policy. We consider a population composed of employed and unemployed workers as well as individuals who do not seek employment. Job search behavior is private information implying that...

The European Commission recently proposed to move towards a consolidated tax base for European multinational companies, to be allocated across EU member states through a system of formula apportionment. This paper argues that while the Commission’s four alternative blueprints for company tax...

We set up a probabilistic voting model to explore the hypothesis that tax competition improves public sector efficiency and social welfare. In the absence of tax base mobility, distortions in the political process induce vote-maximising politicians to create rents to public sector employees....