The paper presents a general method for estimating a country's level of fundamental house prices and its interaction with actual house prices. We set up a unified empirical model which can be used to analyze the time-series behavior of the fundamental house price and to test various hypotheses...

This paper analyses the effects of cuts in the marginal tax rates on income from labour and capital on the macroeconomy and on the intergenerational distribution of welfare in a small open economy. For this purpose we set up a computable general equilibrium model incorporating overlapping...

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...

This paper suggests that the optimal tax system should favour market-produced services which are close substitutes for home-produced services. First, we modify the classical Corlett-Hague rule for optimal commodity taxation by showing that it may be optimal to impose a relatively low tax rate on...

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....

Advances in information technology have improved the administrative feasibility of redistribution based on lifetime earnings recorded at the time of retirement. We study optimal lifetime income taxation and social insurance in an economy in which redistributive taxation and social insurance...

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 surveys some main results in the theory of capital income taxation in the open economy; reviews recent trends in international taxation, and discusses alternative blueprints for fundamental capital income tax reform from the perspective of an open economy faced with growing mobility of...

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...

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...