One of the most striking tax developments in recent years, and one that continues to attract considerable attention, is the adoption by several countries of a form of ""flat tax."" Discussion of these quite radical reforms has been marked, however, more by assertion and rhetoric than by analysis...

The paper reviews Slovakia''s comprehensive reforms to its taxation and welfare systems in 2004, including the introduction of a flat-rate income tax and single-rate value-added tax (VAT), and linkage of social benefits to participation in labor market programs. Though revenues following the...

Russia dramatically reduced its higher rates of personal income tax (PIT) in 2001 establishing a single marginal rate at the low level of 13 percent. In the following year, real revenue from the PIT actually increased by about 26 percent. This ''flat tax'' experience has attracted much attention...

We isolate a U.S. dollar currency premium by comparing corporate bonds issued in the dollar and the euro by firms o utside t he U .S. a nd e uro a rea. We make s everal empirical observations that dissect the perceived advantage of borrowing in the dollar. First, while the dollar dominates...

This paper assesses the macroeconomic and distributional impact of personal income tax (PIT) reforms in the U.S. drawing on a multi-sector heterogenous agents model in which consumers have non-homothetic preferences and sectors differ in terms of their relative labor and skill intensity. The...

The classical corporate profits tax in the United States involves non-neutralities between: different sources of financing; different forms of business organization; and retaining or distributing earnings and may result in the U.S. investor being at a disadvantage vis-à-vis foreign investors....

We analyze the profitability of FX swaps used by the central bank of Brazil to shed light on the rationale for FX intervention. We find that swaps are profitable in expectation, suggesting that FX intervention is used to stabilize the exchange rate in the face of temporary excessive movements...

This paper assesses a possible explanation for the global downward trend in top personal income tax rates over the last decades: globalization and the related tax evasion and avoidance opportunities could have raised elasticities of taxable income, which would imply lower optimal tax rates. The...

This paper discusses how the structure of the tax system affects its progressivity. It suggests a measure of progressive capacity of tax systems, based on the Kakwani index, but independent of pre-tax income distributions. Using this and other progressivity measures, the paper (i) documents a...