This is a slightly revised version of a lunch talk that the author gave at the National Tax Association's 46th Annual Spring Symposium on May 12. It addresses, among other topics, why there is so little consensus regarding international tax policy, and what lessons we learn from the recent wave...

Neither income, consumption, nor wealth is an "ideal" tax base, or one that plausibly identifies what one really should want to tax. Rather, they are best justified as imperfect stand-ins for some underlying (but unobservable) metric of inequality that may be relevant to distributive justice...

This working paper is a forthcoming chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics, edited by Francesco Parisi. It provides a brief overview of economic issues in tax law, including distribution and efficiency in general, the role of administrative and political economy concerns in an...

Debate about U.S. international tax policy often emphasizes norms, such as capital export neutrality (CEN) and capital import neutrality (CIN), that relate to worldwide welfare rather than U.S. national welfare. While this focus may seem paradoxical, or at least surprisingly altruistic in a...