Going from low inflation to price stability involves a short term loss (associated with the" higher unemployment rate required to reduce the inflation) and results in a series of welfare gains" in all future years. The primary source of these gains is the reduction in the distortions that...

By changing the relative gain to incorporation, corporate taxation can play an important role in a firm's choice of organizational form. General equilibrium models have shown that substantial shifting of organizational form in response to tax rates implies a large deadweight loss of taxation....

Fundamental tax reform may change relative prices of consumption goods and may therefore have important effects on the uses side that are ignored by most general equilibrium simulation models. For a uniform rate of tax, in our model, results on the uses side are driven by the nonuniform tax...

Federal income tax rules, and especially changes in those rules, combine with financial market circumstances (interest rates) to create incentives bearing on property-casualty insurers' decisions regarding the level of loss reserves to report. These incentives have varied substantially over the...

As a tax base, 'consumption' is sometimes argued to be less fair than 'income' because the benefits of not taxing capital income accrue to high-income households. We argue that, despite the common perception that consumption taxation eliminates all taxes on capital income, consumption and income...

The standard theory of trade reform uses a passive government budget constraint, in which changes in tariff revenue are offset by changes in lump sum transfers. This paper offers a general framework for the analysis of trade reform when the government budget constraint is active, meaning that...

Tax reforms are sometimes touted to have strong macroeconomic growth effects. We consider the impact of a major tax reform on the long-term growth rates of the U.S. economy using three approaches. The first approach is to examine the historical record of the U.S. economy to evaluate whether tax...

This paper evaluates research examining the effects of tax-based saving incentives on private and national saving. Several" factors make this an unusually difficult problem. First, households that participate in, or are eligible for, saving incentive plans have systematically stronger tastes for...

This paper examines the impact of the Tax Reform Act of 1986 (TRA) on international joint ventures by American firms. The evidence suggests that the TRA had a significant effect on the organizational form of U.S. business activity abroad. The TRA mandates the use of separate credits on income...

In this paper, we summarize recent advances in the study of effects of tax policy on the fixed investment decisions of firms. We attempt to identify consensus where it has been achieved and to highlight important unresolved issues. In addition, we discuss the implications of recent findings for...