What government-observable characteristics should determine the taxes that an individual pays and/or the transfers that she receives? This article focuses on a specific aspect of this fundamental question of tax policy: the implications of policymakers' uncertainty regarding the outcomes of tax...

Two-sided platform firms serve distinct customer groups that are connected through interdependent demand, and include major businesses such as the media industry, banking, and the software industry. A well known textbook result in one-sided markets is that a government may increase a...

In recent years R&D tax incentives have been characterized by increasing scale and spread on innovation activity. Approaches to integrated R&D tax incentives into "recipes" for long-term growth and competitiveness were developed and tested in many countries. For example, only 12 OECD members...

The philanthropic sector is highly consequential, particularly in the United States, and the most important policies directed toward this sector are tax policies. Yet most economic analysis of the optimal tax treatment of charitable giving is ad hoc, treating it as a subject unto itself. This...

A kind of folk theorem in tax policy states that too much uncertainty about the impact of taxing (or subsidizing) a particular taxable attribute is cause for excluding that attribute from the tax base. I extend the optimal tax model to test this hypothesis. In my model, the government is not...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether recurrent changes to Canada’s Capital Cost Allowance (CCA) system have significantly increased its complexity leading to incremental costs and inefficiencies for businesses. The study examines the extent to which the CCA system meets the...

Structural transformation has resulted in an increasing share of services in aggregate value-added in advanced and developing countries across the world. We analyze the impact of this shift into services on countries' efficiency in collecting the value-added tax (VAT). The analysis is based on...

This paper is to determine the optimality of taxation based on a comparative analysis of income taxation in developed and developing countries. In our opinion, the main idea of income tax should be the optimal distribution of tax literacy on the basis of a direct definition of income of...

What are the best climate change tax policies for governments with relatively small open economies such as the Canadian one? This chapter assesses recent Canadian government climate change tax policy initiatives, discusses the merits of carbon taxes versus cap and trade solutions then considers...

All Direct and Indirect taxes accompanied by tax laws, accounting, auditing and tax returns, can be abolished if a new tax system called “TOP Tax system” is adopted and implemented by all nations. TOP Tax system will relieve 7 billion people of the world from the cobweb of ambiguous and...