Our paper begins with the relatively simple problem of optimal taxation as viewed by the capital-exporting ("home") country when it can assume that its actions do not alter the tax rate in the host country. Section I also shows that when foreign investment accounts for a significant fraction of...

One of the best known results in modern public finance is the Chamley-Judd result showing that the optimal tax rate on capital income is zero in the long-run. In this paper, we reexamine this result by analyzing a series of generalizations of the Chamley-Judd formulation. We show that in a model...

This paper develops a realistic, tractable theoretical model that can be used to investigate socially-optimal capital taxation. We present a dynamic model of savings and bequests with heterogeneous random tastes for bequests to children and for wealth per se. We derive formulas for optimal tax...

With heterogeneity in both skills and discount factors, the Atkinson-Stiglitz theorem that savings should not be taxed does not hold. We consider a model with heterogeneity of preferences at each earnings level. With some assumptions on the equilibrium, a small savings tax on high earners and a...

This paper studies optimal dynamic tax policy under the threat of political reform. A policy will be reformed ex post if a large enough political coalition supports reform; thus, credible policies are those that will continue to attract enough political support in the future. If the only...

Chamley (1986) and Judd (1985) showed that, in a standard neoclassical growth model with capital accumulation and infinitely lived agents, either taxing or subsidizing capital cannot be optimal in the steady state. In this paper, we introduce innovation-led growth into the Chamley-Judd...

We characterize the optimal linear tax on capital in an Overlapping Generations model with two period lived households facing uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. The Ramsey government internalizes the general equilibrium feedback of private precautionary saving. For logarithmic utility...

The standard analysis of the optimal international tax policy of a small country typically assumes that the country either imports or exports capital, but does not do both. This paper considers the situation in which a small country both exports and imports capital and can alter its tax on one...

The optimal taxation of foreign and domestic investors' incomes is examined with a simple overlapping-generations model. Even when tax rates are allowed to discriminate between these groups,the optimal tax rates on both domestic and foreign investors' incomes in the small open economy are...

This paper analyzes optimal progressive capital income taxation in an infinite horizon model where individuals differ only through their initial wealth. We show that, in that context, progressive taxation is a much more powerful and efficient tool to redistribute wealth than linear taxation on...