The financial crisis has opened up a global debate on the taxation of the financial sector. A number of international policy initiatives, most notably by the G20, have called for major changes in the tax treatment of financial institutions and transactions as well as individuals working in the...

Recent works in the field of optimal taxation (Saez, 2002a,b) have emphasized the importance of the length of the time horizon in order to properly evaluate the effects and the desirability of a given tax instrument. On one hand this concern for the time horizon has been developed into the...