We investigate how continental European unemployment can be reduced without reducing unemployment benefits and without reducing the net income of low-wage earners. Lower unemployment replacement rates reduce unemployment, the net wage and unemployment benefits. A lower tax on labour increases...

This paper extends the standard model of optimum commodity taxation (Ramsey (1927) and Diamond-Mirrlees (1971)) to a competitive economy in which some markets are inefficient due to asymmetric information. As in most insurance markets, consumers impose varying costs on suppliers but firms cannot...

We consider a therapeutic market with potentially three pharmaceutical firms. Two of the firms offer horizontally differentiated brand-name drugs. One of the brand-name drugs is a new treatment under patent protection that will be introduced if the profits are sufficient to cover the entry...

There is much debate on how the flow of information between firms should be organized, and whether existing privacy laws should be amended. We offer a welfare comparison of the three main current policies towards consumer privacy anonymity, opt in, and opt out within a two-period model of...

We show in a two-period world with endogenous savings and two assets, one of them exhibiting a stochastic return, that an interest-adjusted income tax is optimal. This tax leaves a riskless component of interest income tax free and taxes the excess return with a special tax rate. There is no...

Current policy initiatives taken by the EU and the OECD aim at abolishing preferential corporate tax regimes. This note extends Keen's (2001) analysis of symmetric capital tax competition under preferential (or discriminatory) and non-discriminatory tax regimes to allow for countries of...

This paper analyses the switch to an ACE or to a CBIT type of tax system starting from the present German tax system. We show that in case an ACE type of reform is financed by an increase in the VAT and not in the profit tax, it might be preferred to a CBIT even in the context of an open...

The rise in foreign direct investment and the increasing activity of multinational firms expose national corporate tax bases to cross-country profit shifting, but also lead to rising profitability of the corporate sector. We incorporate these two effects of economic integration into a simple...

This paper investigates replacing separate taxation by consolidation and formulary apportionment in a Bottom-up Federation, when a multijurisdictional firm is mobile in various respects. The reform is decided cooperatively by all the jurisdictions or by some of them, while tax rates remain...