I use data from the 1994 Consumer Expenditure Survey as well as other sources to measure the distributional impact of green tax reforms and consumption tax reforms using both annual income and lifetime income approaches to rank households. A modest tax reform in which environmental taxes equal...

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...

Fundamental tax reform is examined in a heterogeneous overlapping-generations (OLG) model in which agents face idiosyncratic earnings shocks and uncertain life spans. Following Auerbach and Kotlikoff (1987), a Lump-Sum Redistribution Authority is used to rigorously examine efficiency gains over...

This paper examines the welfare consequences of changing the current U.S. income tax system to a progressive consumption tax. We compute a sequence of single period equilibria in which savings decisions depend on the expected future return to capital. In the presence of existing income taxes,...

The economic changes associated with globalization tighten financial pressures on governments of high-income countries by increasing the demand for government spending while making it more costly to raise tax revenue. Greater international mobility of economic activity, and associated...

This paper reports new estimates of the sensitivity of taxable income to changes in tax rates based on a comparison of the tax returns of the same individual taxpayers before and after the 1986 tax reform. This comparison is done by using a panel of more than 4000 individual tax returns created...

Over three-quarters of US taxpayers receive income tax refunds, indicating tax prepayments above the level of tax liability. This amounts to a zero interest loan to the government. Previous studies have suggested two main explanations for this behavior: precautionary behavior in light of tax...

The merits of capital levies depend on the likelihood of repetition, the extent of anticipation, and its effects on distribution. The relevance of these features, which in varying degrees is underdeveloped or underappreciated in pertinent literatures, is elaborated and then considered with...

The effects of income and consumption taxation are examined in the context of models in which the growth process is driven by the accumulation of human and physical capital. The different channels through which these taxes affect economic growth are discussed, and it is shown that in general the...