Using a two-period model with two types of agents that are characterized by present-biased preferences second-best optimal tax-transfer policies are considered. The paternalistic optimal tax-transfer policy has two main concerns: Income redistribution from high to low ability households and...

In a two-type Stiglitz (1982) model of optimal non-linear taxation it is shown that when the utility function relating to consumption is logaritmic the shadow price of the incentive constraint relating to the optimal tax problem exactly equals the Gini coefficient of the secondbest optimal...

Progressive income taxation has for some time been recognized to provide incentives for wage restraint in models with imperfectly competitive labour markets. Recent research has established that bargaining over individual working hours may reverse the wage restraining effect such that increased...

It is shown that although government debt in principle has an ambiguous effect on the steady state capital stock in an OLG model of the Blanchard-Cass-Yaari variety, once stability of the steady state equilibrium is imposed there is an unambiguous negative relation between the level of...

Faced with ageing populations many European countries may be tempted to attract immigrants. One way to do this is to offer tax incentives. Since the decision to migrate is a discrete choice it should be average taxes that are important for the migration decision. If, however, the supply of...

Coordination of tax policies among policy makers is an often considered remedy against inefficiently low taxes on mobile tax bases induced by tax competition. Tax coordination may, however, not be particularly successful if some countries do not take part in the coordination. The outcome of such...

The choice of exchange rate regime is considered for a small open economy. Assuming that different forms of fixed exchange rate regimes involve different costs of reneging, it is shown that one potential beneficial aspect of joining a monetary union with a common currency is that it is less...

E-commerce in physical goods enhances the degree of product market competition but leads also to higher trading costs as goods bought through the internet are shipped individually. Do these features of e-commerce support a case for granting preferential tax treatment to online shopping? This is...

For a small open economy where the government is restricted to raise revenue using border taxes only, the optimal structure of border taxes is considered. As a matter of normalization exports and the supply to the market of the primary factor may be assumed to be untaxed, but that the household...

Over the past decade the taxation of e-commerce has been widely discussed among politicians, tax law experts and economists. To put some perspective on this issue it is analyzed to what extent e-commerce can actually be taxed and the severity of the ensuing tax revenue losses following from...