We study the consequences of the introduction of widespread limited liability for corporations, with particular reference to the liability reforms introduced in Great Britain during the nineteenth century. In the view that is most widely accepted, by reducing transactions costs associated with...

This paper studies the welfare effects of tax reforms moving in the direction of flat-rate taxation of income. The welfare impact of such reforms can be decomposed into two effects: (i) the increase in welfare associated with substitution among taxed commodities, and (ii) the loss in welfare...

The multinationalization of corporate investment in recent years has given rise to a number of international tax avoidance schemes that may be eroding tax revenues in industrialized countries, but which may also reduce tax burdens on mobile capital and so facilitate investment. Both the welfare...

Investors frequently hold equity in tax-exempt savings vehicles such as pension plans, despite the prediction of the standard model that they hold only bonds. We provide a new explanation for this empirical puzzle based on differences between pensions and taxable assets in the tax treatment of...

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions on preferences for uniform taxation to be Pareto efficient in a many-consumer economy. We argue that uniformity is desirable only under conditions far more restrictive than suggested in previous literature, most of which is based on analysis of a...

Intergovernmental transfer programs in many federal systems, including Canada, attempt to equalize differences in subnational jurisdictions' tax capacities on the basis of the so-called representative tax system (RTS). It is shown that RTS equalization grants effectively compensate local...

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We study a screening game in a competitive insurance market, in which insurance customers differ with respect to both accident probability and degree of risk aversion. It is shown that indifference curves of customers in different risk classes cross exactly twice: thus the single crossing...