This note assesses the relative efficiency of different tax bases in an open economy. If terms of trade effects are large, lump-sum taxation may be inferior to distortionary consumption or wage taxes. This result is demonstrated analytically using a simple neoclassical model. An overlapping...

Using the post-WWII data of U.S. federal corporate income tax changes, within a Smooth Transition VAR, this paper finds that the output effect of capital income tax cuts is government debt-dependent: it is less expansionary when debt is high than when it is low. To explore the mechanisms that...

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to assess the effects of temporary business tax cuts. First, the analysis extends the Ricardian equivalence result to an environment with production and establishes that a temporary tax cut financed by a future tax-increase has no real...

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...

When the top personal tax rates are above the corporate rate, high-income individuals have an incentive to reclassify their earnings as corporate rather than personal income for tax purposes. U.S. tax law at least imposes strict limits on the extent to which employees in publicly traded...

This paper highlights the importance of the role of the domestic tax system in determining the economic consequences of an external debt overhang. A simple taxation scheme is specified and it is shown that a country can be on the “wrong side” of its debt Laffer curve only if it is on the...

It is argued that taxation causes three kinds of deadweight losses and two types of direct costs. The deadweight losses arise from substitution, evasion, and avoidance activities while the direct costs are administrative and compliance costs. Some of these social costs tend to be discontinuous...

Finance and growth emerged as a distinct field of economics during the last three decades as economists integrated the fields of finance and economic growth and then explored the ramifications of the functioning of financial systems on economic growth, income distribution, and poverty. In this...

What drove the UK productivity slowdown post-GFC, and how is the post-Covid recovery expected to differ? This paper traces the sources of TFP growth in the UK over the last two decades through the lens of a structural model of innovation, using registry data on the universe of firms. The...