In a Federal system of government, each unit of government decides independently how much of each type of public good to provide, and what types of taxes, and which tax rates, to use in funding the public goods. In this paper we explore what types of problems can arise from this decentralized...

Many provisions of the Social Security Program distort an individual's labor supply incentives. In particular, the payroll tax, the earnings test, the offsetting actuarial adjustment, and the dependence of the size of future benefits on the level of current earnings all affect the net return to...

Since the average tax rate on corporate capital income is very high, economists often conclude that taxes have caused a substantial fall in corporate investment, a movement of capital into noncorporate uses, and a fall in personal savings. The combined efficiency costs of these distortions are...

During the past decade, the inflation rate has been very high by historical standards, yet the U.S. tax law has yet to adjust to this fact. The purpose of this paper is to investigate to what degree the lack of indexing of the corporate and personal income taxes by itself ought to have resulted...

Why is interest income taxed more heavily than other forms of capital income? This differential tax treatment has generated substantial tax arbitrage, resulting in lower tax revenue, efficiency costs, and apparently net gains to rich borrowers and net losses to poor lenders, together suggesting...

Recent theoretical work has argued that a small open economy should use residence-based but not source-based taxes on capital income. Given the ease with which residents can evade domestic taxes on foreign earnings from capital, however, a residence-based tax may not be administratively...

To what degree will the recent free-trade agreement create pressure on the U.S. and Canada to modify, and perhaps harmonize, their tax systems? What will be the implications of the more extensive policy changes now going on within the E.C.? This paper examines the types of pressures for reform...

Models of corporate behavior normally assume that a firm acts in the interest of shareholders, and that shareholders care only about the returns they receive on the shares they own in that firm. But shareholders should also care about the effects of a manager's decisions on the value of shares...