The logic of international tax competition requires that European countries reduce their corporate income tax rates for mobile business activities. It does not require them to reduce their tax rates on business profits overall. Yet, that is what has happened in many countries. The spill-over...

This paper offers an overview of the thinking on personal income taxation in the Netherlands over the last two centuries. The starting point is the short-lived 1795 income tax, and the subject finds its logical finale in the Income Tax Act 2001. In between lies first a century of mainly...

Deductibility of interest under corporate income taxation creates a clear and strong incentive to finance corporate investments out of debt rather than equity. For MNEs, there is also a clear and strong incentive to create internal debts as a tax planning tool. National tax legislation in...

Legal instrumentalism is a perspective on the role of law in society; it analyses legal rules as instruments to achieve social goals. Critics of legal instrumentalism would say: it tries to justify political interference with the social consensus expressed in traditional law. Applying the...

When tax rules change, taxpayers may face an increased tax burden that they were not able to anticipate upon. This raises the normative question of transition regimes: should taxpayers be compensated for unexpected losses? Academic thought typically focuses on single-rule changes. But in...

The academic debate on taxation of endowments or 'talents' is misguided in several respects. Following John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, it tends to over-emphasize the 'slavery of the talented' problem. As a result, it ignores that a full-fledged endowment tax, if feasible, would offer a sizeable...

Action 15 of the OECD/G-20 Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (BEPS) project is to “develop a multilateral instrument designed to provide an innovative approach to international tax matters”. The authors turn to two areas of academic thought to clarify the choices faced by states when engaging...

The choice of tax bases (income, consumption, or some pragmatic hybrid) used to be an important question of normative tax theory. It is suggested here that the choice should be based on the current desire to reduce “aggressive” tax planning behaviour. I.e., if tax avoidance is a growing...

In this contribution, we take a closer look at the process of international tax co-ordination which has gained momentum over the last few years. In this process, different areas have been discussed, such as corporate income taxation, taxation of savings, taxation of ecommerce, and measures...

In most OECD countries the gap between rich and poor has widened over the past decades. This paper analyzes whether and to what extent taxes and social transfers have contributed to this trend. Has the redistributive power of different social programs changed over time? The paper contributes to...