The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This paper examines the validity of this claim in an optimal income tax framework. Contrary to the recommendation...

This paper assesses how a permanent shift from financing a public pay-as-you-go pension by direct (labour income) taxation towards financing it by indirect(consumption) taxation affects the economy and welfare. To this end, we use anoverlapping-generations-augmented two-region general...

An optimal taxation approach is employed to discuss the interaction between factor and commodity taxes for a small open economy when both profit-earning firms and domestic consumers are imperfectly mobile internationally. In this framework, we demonstrate two main results: first, a...

This paper analyzes transfer pricing incentives under a destination-based and an origin-based VAT system. While a switch to the origin-based VAT may moderate or reinforce the incentive for transfer pricing induced by income tax differentials, we show that in the case of the EU this switch tends...

In this paper, we introduce a closed-economy version of the dynamicenvironmental multi-sector general equilibrium modelEMuSeto analyze the effects of financing a labor tax reduction through higher consumption, energy or emissions taxation.We find that, for sufficiently high environmental damage,...

We discuss how cross-country unemployment insurance can be used to improve international risk sharing. We use a two-country business cycle model with incomplete financial markets and frictional labor markets where the unemployment insurance scheme operates across both countries. Cross-country...

Paternalism, merit goods and specific egalitarianism are concepts we sometimes meet in the literature. The thing in common is that the policy maker does not fully respect the consumer sovereignty principle and designs policies according to some other criterion than individuals' preferences....