Recent years have seen large swings in house prices in many countries. Motivated by housing price variations, proposals for taxing capital gains on housing have repeatedly been put forth. The idea seems to be that such taxes would curb the redistribution occurring between those owning houses and...

In many OECD countries, statutory corporate tax rates are lower than personal income tax rates. The present paper argues that this tax rate differentiation is an optimal tax policy if there are problems of asymmetric information between investors and firms in the capital market. The reduction of...

A large part of the literature on tax competition argues that capital tends to be undertaxed if there is no international coordination of tax policies. This result constitutes an important theoretical basis for practical tax policy in particular in the EU, where minimum tax rates have been...

In the second contribution, Clemens Fuest and Bernd Huber take a more sympathetic view of the reform. Evaluating the pros and cons of corporate-personal tax integration with a special view on border crossing investment, they argue that the switch from the full imputation system to the classical...

Die Europäische Kommission hat kürzlich eine Reihe von Vorschlägen zur umfassenden Koordination der Unternehmensbesteuerung im europäischen Binnenmarkt vorgelegt. Der vorliegende Beitrag analysiert diese Vorschläge und kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass sie keine überzeugende Grundlage für die...

This paper compares the second-best optimal tax on polluting consumption goods with the Pigovian tax, which would internalize marginal environmental damage at a second-best optimum. It is shown that the relationship between the optimal tax on polluting consumption and the Pigovian tax is...

This paper discusses the role of multinational firms and double taxation treaties for corporate income taxation in open economies. We show that it is optimal for a small open economy to levy positive corporate income taxes if multinational firms are taxed according to the full taxation after...