In February 2013, eleven Member States agreed to adopt the Commissions' Proposal for a Council Directive implementing enhanced cooperation in the area of financial transaction tax, COM (2013)71 final. This article reviews three thematic areas frequently discussed by practitioners and academia...

"This paper considers an optimal taxation environment where household income is private information, and the government randomly audits and punishes households found to be underreporting. We prove that the optimal mechanism derived using standard mechanism design techniques has a bad equilibrium...