Recently, a research program on the compliance costs and the economic effects of taxation in New Zealand was undertaken within the Inland Revenue Department. Taxation and the Limits of Government is an edited volume which presents the best of the papers that emerged from that research program....

This paper solves an often neglected problem of efficient taxation where the policymaker is interested in minimizing the dead weight burden imposed on the society by labor income taxes. Specifically, it argues that the efficient tax function assumes the form of a step function. Furthermore, it...

This paper provides a new and improved measure of the marginal cost of public funds (MCF). It is based on a benchmark tax which is distributionally neutral and non-distortive. This is in contrast to the MCF-measure used in the previous literature, that has used the regressive uniform lump-sum...