This paper reexamines the issue of optimal capital income taxation in an endogenous growth model with overlapping generations. By assuming costly state verification for capital producing projects, we show that the presence of the information asymmetry creates inefficiency in the credit market by...

This paper studies the optimal rate of seigniorage in an economy characterized by bilateral trade and a tax-evading underground sector. Optimal inflation depends on which sector, formal or underground, is more congested with buyers. If the underground sector is more congested, the optimal...

This paper studies optimal taxation in dynamic economies with increasing returns. We show that if there exists a stable open-loop Stackelberg equilibrium, the optimal rate of tax on capital income in the steady state is negative in order to eliminate the wedge between the private and the social...

Progressive income taxes have usually been justified on the basis of the ability-to-pay (ATP) and equal sacrifice principles, but how ATP and sacrifice should be measured remains unsettled. In this paper, I present an alternative rationale for progressive taxes on the basis of the concept of...

Deme, Franck and Naqvi(2005) showed that the increased government expenditure on education, training and skill acquisition leads to lower unemployment rate, expansion of the urban formal sector and the contraction of the urban informal sector. This was observed to be the case in Lesotho. The...

This paper examines the elasticity of taxable income with special focus on income controls designed to control for divergence in the income distribution and mean reversion. Additional emphasis is placed on the difference between short-run and longer-run responses to tax rate changes. Several...

This paper applies the methods of Gruber and Saez (2002) to a panel of tax returns spanning 1979 through 2001 in order to examine the sensitivity of the elasticities of taxable and broad income to an array of factors. The paper finds that that Gruber and Saez’s approach yields an estimated...

This paper examines alternative methodologies for measuring responses to the 1990 and 1993 federal tax increases. The methodologies build on those employed by Gruber and Saez (2002), Carroll (1998), and Auten and Carroll (1999). Internal Revenue Service tax return data for the project are from...

This paper examines alternative methodologies for measuring responses to the 1990 and 1993 federal tax increases. The methodologies build on those employed by Gruber and Saez (2002), Carroll (1998) and Auten and Carroll (1999). Internal Revenue Service tax return data for the project are from...

This paper examines income trends from 1992 to 2004 and the responsiveness of different income measures to tax changes for corporate executives and for the very highest income U.S. taxpayers. We detail the growth in executive compensation and break down the components of that growth by sources,...