When capital is perfectly mobile across countries and labour is fixed, a source-based tax on capital both reduces and redistributes world income. We show that under plausible circumstances there always exists a country that benefits from introducing such a tax.

We model the motives for residents of a country to hold foreign assets, including the precautionary motive that has been omitted from much previous literature as intractable. Our model captures many of the principal insights from the existing specialized literature on the precautionary motive,...