Recent theoretical work has shown that the incidence of ad valorem and specific taxes may differ and each may be over or under-shifted onto consumers in the presence of imperfect competition. These results are used to derive a method of estimating market power and conduct. An application is made...

In this paper I evaluate the effects of a regional experiment that reduced payroll-taxes by 3-6 percentage points of the firm's wage sum in Northern and Eastern Finland. I estimate the effect of the payroll-tax reduction on firms' employment, wage sum and profits, and on workers hourly pay and...

While a basic theoretical principle in public economics assumes that individuals’ behaviour is fully-optimizer with respect to the introduction of a tax, an increasing body of research is presenting evidence that agents decision making is often affected by non-negligible cognitive biases,...

It is often argued that the quantity which is traded on the market is independent of the side of the market which is taxed. However, this assertion need not hold, especially in imperfectly competitive markets like that for labour. Taking an efficiency wage economy as an example, it is shown that...

Environmental tax schemes in OECD countries often involve tax rates differentiated across industrial, commercial and household sectors. In this paper, we investigate four potentially important arguments for these deviations from uniform taxation: pre-existing tax distortions, domestic equity...

Previous studies have shown that the optimal marginal tax rate at the bottom of the income distribution may be positive, negative, or even zero. This paper reexamines this problem in a unified framework and tries to evaluate the arguments. It turns out that the case for positive marginal tax...