The discontinuous tax treatment of sales at borders creates incentives for individuals to cross-border shop. This paper addresses whether it is optimal for a state composed of multiple regions to levy differentiated commodity tax rates across the regions. In a model where states maximize social...

This note shows that residence- and source-based taxes on capital income are not sufficient to sustain an efficient Nash equilibrium when several goods are internationally traded, apart from two special cases. With several traded commodities, domestic fiscal policies affect foreign welfare not...

Recent work has started to analyze the choice of international commodity tax base under conditions of imperfect competition. This paper focuses on the effects of changing levels of trade barriers in a model where firms engage in duopoly competition and governments set commodity taxes...

Commodity taxes have three distinct roles: (1) revenue collection, (2) interpersonal redistribution, and (3) resource allocation. The paper presents an integrated treatment of these three concerns in a second-best general equilibrium framework, which leads to the “generalized Ramsey rule”...

We analyze the choice between the origin and destination principles of taxation when there is product differentiation and Bertrand competition. If taxes are redistributed to consumers and demand is linear the origin principle dominates the destination principle whatever the degree of product...

Why is interest income taxed so much more heavily than other forms of capital income? This differential tax treatment has generated substantial tax arbitrage, resulting in lower tax revenue, efficiency costs, and apparently net gains to rich borrowers and net losses to poor lenders, together...

We study the optimal tax/pension design in a two-period model where individuals differ in both productivity and discount rates or projection bias and where their utility of the retirement period consumption is not independent of the earlier standard of living. We consider both welfarist and...