Tax rules encouraging excessive debt, complex financial transactions, poorly designed incentive compensation for corporate managers, and highly leveraged home ownership all may have contributed to the financial crisis, but do not appear to have been among the primary causes. Even without a...

Surely just about everyone in the U.S. federal income tax field has heard of Henry Simons, if only for his famous definition of “personal income.” Few realize, however, that this proponent of “drastic progression” in a broad-based income tax was also a self-described libertarian who...

Minimum taxes (including global minimum taxes) have serious drawbacks, and generally make sense, if at all, only if otherwise superior options must be ruled out for reasons of optics or political economy. Yet, given the “compared to what?” question that haunts all real-world tax...

Recent years have witnessed rising debate, on both sides of the Atlantic, regarding how to define the category of individuals whom a given country classifies as domestic taxpayers, and who thus may be taxable on their foreign source income (FSI) even if they live abroad. While the United States...

This is the slightly expanded text of a talk that the author gave on June 1, 2016, at a conference in Amsterdam that was cosponsored by NYU Law School and the Amsterdam Centre for Tax Law. The conference concerned anti-BEPS implementation in the EU, and the talk concerned the U.S. response to...

The last thirty years have witnessed rising income and wealth concentration among the top 0.1 percent of the population, leading to intense political debate regarding how, if at all, policymakers should respond. Often, this debate emphasizes the tools of public economics, and in particular...

The current age of inequality is also an age of extensive tax and related public economics scholarship about inequality. Three prominent aspects of recent research especially stand out. The first concerns empirical measurement of economic inequality, as it has changed over time. The second...

In recent decades, a number of fantastically successful, mainly American, multinational entities (MNEs) – led and epitomized by the “Four Horsemen,” Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google – have risen to global economic hyper-prominence. While their market capitalizations and profits are...

The persistence of the book-tax gap, or excess of companies' reported financial accounting income over their taxable income, suggests that accounting manipulation and tax sheltering remain significant problems, even in the aftermath of the "Enron era." Some have therefore suggested making the...

In both Europe and the United States, there has been much recent debate regarding whether, in response to the 2008 financial crisis, one should enact a financial transactions tax (FTT) or a financial activities tax (FAT) – commonly viewed as mutually exclusive alternatives. This article...