In many situations governments have sector-specific tax and regulation policies at their disposal to influence the market outcome after a national or an international merger has taken place. In this paper we study the implications for merger policy when countries non-cooperatively deploy...

This paper argues that equal per-capita health care premia offer no systematic advantage as an instrument of financing the welfare state. Either will simultaneous changes in the tax system be necessary to compensate their redistributive effects, in which case all efficiency gains derived from a...

A widely noticed result by de Crombrugghe and Tulkens (1990) states that asymmetric commodity tax competition always leads to tax rates being too low in both countries, even though there are counteracting tax base and terms of trade effects. This note argues that the result depends crucially on...

The paper analyzes the optimal mix of capital and wage taxation when policymakers maximize the political support of workers and capitalists, subject to a fixed revenue requirement. Capital market integration increases the efficiency costs of a tax on capital but simultaneously changes the...

The Commission of the European Communities has proposed to replace current border tax adjustments at the interaal borders of EC member countries by a set of three distinct measures that comprise an international tax-on-tax deduction of the value-added tax, the harmonization of current...

The paper analyzes the implications of allowing for trade deflection under the restricted origin principle. It is shown that (a) producer trade deflection leads to circular trade and must be ruled out to obtain a trade equilibrium, (b) consumer trade deflection will not occur in a Nash...