This paper studies the impact of point of sale technology adoption on local tax compliance by firms. The paper exploits administrative data on monthly restaurant and hotel tax payments in the Indonesian districts of West Manggarai and Gorontalo and combines this with information on the point of...

It is frequently argued that it would be beneficial to move the tax mix towards greater reliance on consumption taxes, with offsetting reductions in income taxes. Proponents argue that this would increase the incentives to “work, save, and invest” and would help improve productivity growth....

As noted 30 years ago by Martin Feldstein, optimal taxes may be useless for practical purposes and emphasis should instead be placed on the possibility of enhancing welfare by reforming existing tax rates. In this perspective, marginal commodity tax reforms are gaining increasing attention due...

Croatia is the first country in the world that fully accepted the consumption concept in the field of direct taxes in its alternative form - the prepayment approach, called interest adjusted income tax and interest adjusted profit tax too. In comparison with the European tax systems (and those...

This paper evaluates the distributional and welfare effects of two recent changes of Value Added Tax (VAT) and excise taxes in Italy applying and comparing two related and complementary methods of analysis: the first based on the distributional characteristics of Feldstein (1972) and recently...

Perhaps the most serious ethical and political obstacle to converting an income tax to a consumption tax is that older persons who have accumulated wealth after paying income tax will be taxed again under the new consumption tax if they spend down their wealth. A crucial question that arises is...

This paper examines the economic effects of tax reform in an endogenous growth model that allows for two types of useful public expenditures; one type contributes to human capital formation while the other provides direct utility to households. We show that the optimal fiscal policy calls for...

One of the main advantages of consumption taxation that its advocates, including me, have claimed is simplification. However, the extent to which simplification actually would result from a major consumption-based tax reform would depend not only on the compliance and administrative issues...