[Note: For a revised and expanded version of this paper, please see Hidden Foreign Aid, http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1044041]Whether the U.S. government should be allowed to claim credit for the private philanthropy of its citizens is a hot topic in today's foreign aid debate. Overlooked in...

In "Le capital au XXIème siècle" plädiert Thomas Piketty für eine drakonische Kapitalbesteuerung, um das Auseinanderdriften der Vermögen zu stoppen. Aber wegen ihrer schädlichen Anreizwirkung sind die von ihm anvisierten Steuersätze zu hoch. Eine Kombination aus niedrigeren Steuersätzen...

The government's 2010 Comprehensive Spending Review was anything but comprehensive. The cuts to government spending were modest, and large swathes of state activity were barely touched. Britain will remain a heavily regulated, high-tax, high-spend economy. Instead of totally reviewing the...

This study updates previous research estimating the persistent effect of tax changes on capital gains realizations by using a large panel of tax returns from 1999 to 2008. Similar to earlier studies in the literature, we use the type II Tobit model to address the sample selection problem and the...

This paper discusses in a systematic and comprehensive way the existing literature on the relationship between the growth of countries` economies and various public finance instruments, such as tax policy, expenditure policy, and overall budgetary policy, from the perspectives of allocative...