The tax system has at times favoured firm control through private foundations, which has been argued to inhibit high-impact entrepreneurship and economic growth. However, research has been hampered due to a lack of systematic historical tax data. The purpose of this study is threefold. First, we...

This paper studies the evolution of the modern Swedish inheritance taxation from its introduction in 1885 to its abolishment in 2004. A thorough description is offered of the basic principles of the tax, including underlying ideas and ambitions, tax schedules, and rules concerning valuation of...

This paper uses store-level data on consumer liquor revenues and volume sales in Oregon to estimate the effect of state tax differentials on consumer demand. Liquor privatization in Washington led to higher prices from new taxes. I calculate the impact of tax incidence on tax avoidance using...

Bunching estimators were developed and extended by Saez (2010), Chetty et al. (2011) and Kleven and Waseem (2013). Using this method one can get an estimate of the taxable income elasticity from the bunching pattern around a kink point. The bunching estimator has become popular, with a large...

The desirability of inheritance and gift taxes depends on individuals' tax responsiveness. This paper demonstrates how strongly, and in what way, the German inheritance and gift tax influences taxpayer behavior. To that end, it combines administrative data with cross-bracket tax variation: a...

The paper extends Ng's (1987) model of optimal taxation of diamond goods - goods that are valued solely for their costliness. We extend his findings by analyzing how other goods should be taxed in the presence of pure diamond goods; modified Ramsey rules are derived in a basic single-type model...

Anti-suit injunctions (ASIs) have recently emerged as a phenomenon significantly affecting the dynamics of standard essential patent (SEP) litigation. The enhanced role played by these patents in the Internet of Things scenario and the willingness of national courts to set themselves up as...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

This article offers a critical review of recent literature on Chinese legal tradition and argues that some subtle but fundamental differences between the Western and Chinese legal traditions are highly relevant to our explanation of the economic divergence in the modern era. By elucidating the...

From 1945 to 1975, fifteen Western European countries passed school-leaving age laws that raised the number of years of compulsory schooling for the first time after the Second World War. In order to understand the driving forces behind the increase in compulsory schooling and to explain the...