This paper analyzes the development of the ratio of corporate taxes to wage taxes using a simple political economy model with workers and capitalists that own internationally mobile and immobile firms. Among other results, our model predicts that countries reduce their corporate tax rate,...

This paper addresses the optimal mix of capital and wage taxation when policymakers maximize the political support of workers and capitalists, subject to a fixed revenue requirement. Capital market integration increases the efficiency costs of a tax on capital hut simultaneously changes the...

Increased activity of multinational firms exposes national corporate tax bases to cross-country profit shifting, but also leads to rising profitability of the corporate sector. We incorporate these two effects of economic integration into a simple political economy model where the median voter...

We attempt to clarify the role of the production efficiency theorem in international capital taxation. It is shown that a direct open-economy analogue to the production efficiency theorem arises not in the small country case, but in the more general setting of tax competition between a finite...

Most systems of health care financing in EU member states currently include elements of income redistribution. The paper analyzes the effects of shifting this kind of redistribution to the tax system and argues that this reform could create two types of efficiency gains. On the expenditure side,...

The paper analyzes the effects of general commodity taxation under the restricted origin principle when the union countries are small relative to the rest of the world and trade deflection can be controlled by tax authorities. A change in the tax rate of one union country leads to two fiscal...

This paper evaluates the recent proposals for a co-ordinated capital tax policy in the European Union, focusing on an EU-wide minimum withholding tax on interest income and alternative ways to increase the effective tax rate on corporate profits. The analysis draws on current theoretical and...

The Annual Congress of the German Economic Association has become one of the largest national meetings of professional economists. The papers contributed at the Congress undergo a rigorous and competitive selection procedure where only about one half of all submissions are accepted for...

We set up a simple two-country model of tax competition where firms with different productivity decide in which location to produce and sell output. In this model, a unique, asymmetric Nash equilibrium is shown to exist, provided that countries are sufficiently different with respect to their...

This paper investigates the macroeconomic and welfare effects of an anticipated future switch from destination- to origin-based commodity taxation. We set up an intertemporal representative-agent model of an open economy and study especially consumption, investment, and trade-balance responses...