This article studies the properties of a switch from an income tax to a consumption tax in the presence of bequests. The author shows that the consumption tax will distort the bequest decision if bequests are taxed at the consumption tax rate but not when bequests are exempt. It is possible that...

The purpose of this book is to introduce the substantial literature on consumption tax policy and the taxation of capital income, the early literature on optimal tax theory in dynamic overlapping generations models, the more recent literature on optimal taxation in the Ramsey growth model and...