Throughout American history, the U.S. federal and state governments have imposed excise taxes on commodities such as alcohol and tobacco (and more recently, gasoline and firearms). Rates of such "sin" taxation, and consumption taxation broadly (including sales taxes and value-added taxes), are...

This paper evaluates the impact of globalization on the tax bases of countries at varying stages of development. We see globalization as a process that induces countries to embrace greater trade and financial integration. This in turn should shift their tax revenue from "easy to collect" taxes...

Optimal tax theory has shown that, under weak assumptions, indirect taxation such as production subsidies, tariffs, or differentiated commodity taxation, are sub-optimal and that redistribution should be achieved solely with the direct income tax. However, these important results of optimal tax...

While it is usually argued that direct and indirect taxes should be added for meaningful international comparisons of country competitiveness, this paper argues that the opposite may be true. It is possible that a country with a high value-added tax needs a high capital income tax to maintain...

Analyzing the universe of federal environmental regulations in the U.S., we construct a measure of regulations--direct taxes on pollution. Analyzing the universe of firms' investor disclosures, we construct a measure of material environmental concerns--indirect taxes on pollution. These two...

According to our simulation model, these policy changes would almost double the U.S. capital stock by the end of the century and raise long-run real wages by 19 percent compared to the base case alternative. They would also preclude a doubling of the highly regressive payroll tax. Indeed, the...

While governments have multiple tax instruments available to them, studies of the effect of tax policy on the locational decisions of multinationals typically focus exclusively on host country corporate income tax rates and their interaction with home country tax rules. This paper examines the...

This paper discusses the implications of rents and regulations which support them for the design of indirect taxes such as VATS. Intuition suggests high tax rates on industries or products with rents; but we argue that whether rents are natural (due to fixed factors) or market structure related...

This paper discusses how joint cross country indirect tax initiatives can be used to achieve global rebalancing. This is potentially an important development for G20 discussions which thus far have centered on exchange rates as the instruments to achieve rebalancing. We suggest that if China and...