The paper studies a simple voting system that has the potential to increase the power of minorities without sacrificing aggregate efficiency. Storable votes grant each voter a stock of votes to spend as desidered over a series of binary decisions. By cumulating votes on issues that it deems most...

This paper uses computational techniques to assess whether or not various propositions that have been advanced as plausible in the literature on Customs Unions (or other regional trade agreements) may actually hold. The idea is to make probabilistic statements as to whether propositions of...

This paper seeks to contribute to discussion of the reasonableness of sometimes seemingly innocent assumptions used in theoretical trade models that the direction of trade is both predetermined for each good for each country and fixed. Here, we provide computational evidence as to the...

Country incentives to participate in cooperative arrangements which either fully or partially internalize climate change externalities from carbon emissions involve critical asymmetries. Small countries trade off own country costs of carbon mitigation actions against their own benefits from...

Several recent analyses have suggested that the revenue-maximizing corporate tax rate resides in the low-30's. We challenge this result by re-examining this relationship using a new compilation of changes in corporate tax base definitions for OECD countries between 1980 and 2004. By considering...

The relative income gains of the affluent after the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA86), which sharply lowered tax rates at high income levels, are overstated by comparing cross-sectional slices using concurrent income definitions, but they are large nevertheless. Although an index of...

It is often claimed that multinational firms avoid taxes by shifting income from high-tax to low-tax countries. Using a five year panel of data for two hundred large U.S. manufacturing firms, we find that U.S. tax liability, as a fraction either of U.S. sales or U.S. assets, is related to the...

Since the passage of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, foreign direct investment (FDI) both into and from the United States has surged. Inward FDI reached an all-time high of $58.4 billion in 1988, continuing a secular increase that began in the late 1970's. Outward FDI also reached an all-time high...

In 2001, many households received rebate checks as advanced payments of the benefit of the new, 10 percent federal income tax bracket. A survey conducted at the time the rebates were mailed finds that few households said that the rebate led them mostly to increase spending. A follow-up survey in...

The theory of optimal taxation has , for the pas two decades , been the reigning normative approach of taxation. This paper argues that , in its current state, optimal tax theory is incomplete as a guide to action concerning many critical issues in tax policy. It is incomplete because it has not...