The essay discusses some key features of the wawe of public sector reforms that has swept through the OECD area during the last three decades under the heading of New Public Management. I review what economic theory and the empirical evidence can say about the effects of introducing pay for...

Artiklen gennemgår de teoretiske begrundelser for at beskatte ejendomsværdier og grundværdier. Vi finder, at der er et argument for at beskatte ejendomsværdien som et middel til at modvirke de forvridninger, som især beskatningen af kapitalindkomst medfører. Endvidere viser vi, at en skat...

The paper develops a simple general equilibrium framework for calculating the marginal deadweight loss from taxation in a small open economy. The framework allows a decomposition of the deadweight loss from each tax instrument into the losses stemming from the contraction of the different tax...

Using Danish data, we find that about three fourths of the taxes levied to finance public transfers actually finance benefits that do not redistribute between people but redistribute income over the life cycle of individual taxpayers. This provides a rationale for financing part of social...

We analyse recent proposals to shift the tax burden away from low-paid labour, assuming a dual labour market where the 'good' high-paying jobs are rationed. A shift in the tax burden from low-paid to high-paid workers has an ambiguous effect on the level of aggregate employment while the...

A Norwegian tax reform committee recently proposed a personal tax on the realized income from shares after deduction for an imputed risk-free rate of return. This paper describes the design of the proposed shareholder income tax and shows that it will be approximately neutral in several...

Tax competition for mobile capital can undermine the attempts of governments to redistribute income from rich to poor. I study whether international tax coordination can alleviate this problem, using a general equilibrium model synthesizing recent contributions to the tax competition literature....

In the modern welfare state a substantial part of an individual’s tax bill is transferred back to the same individual taxpayer in the form of social transfers. This provides a rationale for financing part of social insurance through mandatory savings accounts. We analyze the behavioral and...

The paper discusses the implications of optimal tax theory for the debates on uniform commodity taxation and neutral capital income taxation. While strong administrative and political economy arguments in favor of uniform and neutral taxation remain, recent advances in optimal tax theory suggest...

The theory of optimal taxation has often been criticized for being of little practical policy relevance, due to a lack of robust theoretical results. This paper argues that recent advances in optimal tax theory has made that theory easier to apply and may help to explain some current trends in...