This paper recommends a system of upstream taxes on fossil fuels, combined with refunds for downstream emissions capture, to reduce carbon and local pollution emissions. Motor fuel taxes should also account for congestion and other externalities associated with vehicle use, at least until...

This article argues that the validity of the increasingly fashionable policy advice—maximizing neutrality in taxation and addressing the distributive objective primarily through expenditure policy—is questionablebecause it ignores the revenue-raising aspect of progressive taxation....

There is widespread agreement in Washington that the income tax needs to be reformed, although little agreement about how to do it. A common thread in most reform proposals is that they would slash most so-called tax expenditures—spending programs run through the tax system. This follows...

This paper presents a model to determine the tax effort and tax capacity of 113 countries and the main variables on which they depend. The results and the model allow a clear determination of which countries are near their tax capacity and which are some way from it, and therefore, could...

We present a simple model of petroleum exploration and development that can be applied to study the performance of alternative tax systems and identify potential distortions. Although the model is a highly simplified, it incorporates many factors and some of the key tradeoffs that would...

This paper develops a realistic, tractable normative theory of socially-optimal capital taxation. We present a dynamic model of savings and bequests with heterogeneous random tastes for bequests to children and for wealth per se. We derive formulas for optimal tax rates on capitalized...

This paper derives optimal inheritance tax formulas that (a) capture the key equity-efficiency trade-off, (b) are expressed in terms of estimable sucient statistics, (c) are robust to the underlying structure of preferences. We consider dynamic stochastic models with general and heterogeneous...

Economic research overwhelmingly shows that the utility individuals derive from their income depends on the incomes of others. Theoretical literature has proven that these status effects imply a more egalitarian income policy than in the conventional case, in which people value their income...

We solve a large class of multidimensional adverse selection problems with one observed action, to derive the nonlinear optimal income tax schedule when individuals differ along multiple unobserved characteristics. Based on a perturbation of the optimal allocation, our method allows individuals...

In order to maximize social welfare, governments should subsidize at different rates the private contributions made to different categories of charitable or publicly beneficial civic activity. This prescription stands in contrast to the standard practice of subsidizing such contributions...