The book offers a comprehensive treatment of tax theory and policy. It surveys the German tax system, portrays tax history, and describes principles of tax administration and the construction of schedules. Tax shifting, optimal taxation theory, and questions of tax justice are considered in...

In a recent paper Professor Dixit criticized the argument that when collection lags characterize tax systems, recourse to inflationary finance should be minimized. He argued that, in such case, rather than minimizing recourse to inflationary finance, the rates of the commodity taxes should be...

We compare unit and ad valorem commodity tax regimes under the "Leviathan hypothesis" that the government seeks to maximize tax revenue. We show that the ad valorem tax regime welfare-dominates the unit tax regime if and only if the economy exhibits "ad valorem under-shifting" in response to a...

In this paper we review both positive and normative aspects of taxation. We examine how to study why taxes and revenue structures have taken their present form and why they are used in a particular way as part of the democratic process. In addition, we also consider the classic normative...

Progressivity, inequality reduction and merging-proofness are three well-known axioms in taxation. We investigate implications of each of the three axioms through characterizations of several families of taxation rules and their logical relations. We also study the preservation of these axioms...

In the history of economic thoughts the problem of a "just" tax rate structure has played an important role. The paper reconsiders the discussions of the last two centuries and sheds additional light on the concrete tax schedules using the more recent methods of tax theory. Even if the...

This paper considers optimal linear tax structures that are differentiated according to group membership. Groups can be heterogeneous with respect to both preferences and abilities. Contrary to most arguments in favour of tax privileges for certain groups, e.g. gender-based taxation, it is shown...

The paper provides a new formulation of the Mirrlees-Seade theorem on the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, under weaker assumptions and in a more general model. The formulation of the theorem is independent of whether the model involves finitely many types or a continuous type...

The ability-to-pay approach assesses taxes paid as a sacrifice by the taxpayers. This raises the question of how to define and how to measure it: in absolute, relative, or marginal terms? U.S. respondents prefer a tax schedule that is either a pure (absolute) Equal Sacrifice or a mixture of...

The paper provides a new proof of the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, in a more general model, under weaker assumptions. The analysis focusses on the (weakly) relaxed problem in which upward incentive constraints are replaced by a monotonicity condition on consumption. Without...