Much attention has been given to the impact of fiscal competition on the level of public expenditure, but relatively little to the impact on its composition. Using a broadly familiar and reasonably rich model of fiscal competition in the presence of mobile capital, this paper establishes a...

The established theory of tax progressivity cannot handle basic tax reform questions, such as whether an increase in personal allowances makes the tax system more progressive, because the core results assume that tax liability is never zero. This paper generalises the core theory to allow for...

The international exchange of tax information, and its merits compared to withholding taxation, has emerged as a central topic in international tax policy. We characterize and compare the outcomes that emerge, in a two-country world, with and without information exchange, under the assumption...

This paper addresses a key but neglected task in the theory of international taxation, lent increased urgency by growing awareness of the potential gains from tax coordination: the characterization of Pareto-efficient international tax regimes. It shows that the Diamond-Mirrlees theorem on the...

This paper explores the implications of a distinctive feature of the value added tax (VAT) that is stressed by practitioners but has been largely overlooked by theorists: that it functions, in part, as a tax on the purchases of informal operators from formal sector businesses and, not least, on...