This paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between an incumbent officeholder and the electorate, where the officeholder is initially uninformed about her ability. If officeholder effort and ability interact in the "production function" that determines performance in office,...

This paper studies whether exchange controls, particularly on the capital account, affect the choice of corporate tax rates, using a panel of 21 OECD countries over the period 1983-99. It builds on existing literature by (1) using a unique dataset with several different measures of the corporate...

This Paper studies a principal-agent model of the relationship between officeholder and an electorate, where everyone is initially uninformed about the officeholder’s ability. If office-holder effort and ability interact in the determination of performance in office, then an office-holder has...

We propose a simple theory to explain why, and under what circumstances, a politician delegates policy tasks to a technocrat in an independent institution and then analyze under what conditions delegation is optimal for society. Our theory builds on Holmström's (1982, 1999)"hidden effort"...

This paper provides a legal and economic analysis of the European Commission's recent proposals for reforming the application of VAT to financial services, with particular focus on their 'third pillar', under which firms would be allowed to opt in to taxation on exempt insurance and financial...

This paper explores the causes and consequences of the remarkable rise of the value added tax (VAT), asking what has shaped its adoption and, in particular, whether it has proved an especially effective form of taxation. It is first shown that a tax innovation, such as the introduction of a VAT,...

This paper investigates whether OECD countries compete with each other over corporation taxes, and whether such competition can explain the fall in statutory tax rates in the 1980s and 1990s. We develop a model in which multinational firms choose their capital stock in response to an effective...

The standard property-rights theory of the firm assumes that prior to investing in human capital, team members meet and negotiate asset ownership. This paper endogenizes the event sequence in a matching model of market equilibrium. Equilibria exist in which, for strategic and efficiency reasons,...