This paper explores the qualitative and quantitative implications of taxation for growth and savings in three Latin American countries: Brazil, Chile and Mexico, studying a small open economy in the context of an endogenous growth model where the domestic interest rate depends on the level of...

President Bush had established a tax reform commission that was exploring various alternatives to the tax system. Many of the reform options under consideration would provide greater tax preferences for general savings such as consumption-style taxes or more targeted approaches such as those...

We consider the optimal factor income taxation in a standard R&D model with technical change represented by an increase in the variety of intermediate goods. Redistributing the tax burden from labor to capital will increase the employment rate in equilibrium. This has opposite effects on two...

Advice abounds on when to carry out a Roth IRA conversion and how to pay for it. Often, a better planning strategy for some taxpayers may be to opt out of the two-year spread election for the tax liability from a Roth IRA conversion, incurring the entire resulting income tax in the conversion...

We study optimal savings policies when there is a dual concern about undersaving for retirement and income inequality. Agents differ in present bias and earnings ability, both unobservable to a planner with paternalistic and redistributive motives. We characterize the solution to this...

This paper proposes the creation of regional currencies, which we call social currencies; (pesetas, dracmas, liras, and deutsche marks); with the finality of financing minimum income programs and micro-finance programs in Europe. The backing for this currency will be Euros collected, based on...

Most of sub-Saharan Africa countries (SSA) have recorded impressive rates of growth and remained resilient to shocks especially during the recent past. Nevertheless, the status of social welfare has remained low as manifested by poor quality of standard of living and short longevity of life. In...

This paper explores the qualitative and quantitative implications of taxation for growth and savings in three Latin American countries: Brazil, Chile and Mexico, studying a small open economy in the context of an endogenous growth model where the domestic interest rate depends on the level of...

In response to increasing calls for policies to raise the U.S. saving rate, proposals are once again being offered in Congress to change the tax base from income to consumption. Beyond the important issues of income distribution (that is, outright unfairness) inherent in such a plan, it would...

There are multiple reasons to motivate the role of capital taxation in the heterogenous-agent incomplete-markets (HAIM) model. One is the production inefficiency caused by precautionary savings. The other is the wealth redistribution role played by capital taxation. To distinguish between these...