The literature on optimal redistributional instruments begins with the assumption that society has some preference for equality, leaving the precise degree unspecified. It then asks: How should society pursue that preference? More specifically, what kinds of policy instruments — whether...

The question of which party should bear the burden of proof on a given factual issue remains one of the most important and problematic in evidence and procedure. This paper approaches the question from a relatively unstudied perspective, viewing litigation as a device for influencing primary...

Elective “inside basis adjustments” are a central feature of partnership taxation, and their prospective infeasibility for publicly traded companies has played an important role in shaping leading corporate integration proposals. This paper questions whether such adjustments are necessary in...

This paper, which is not a standalone document, is the web appendix referenced inChris William Sanchirico, The Ramsey Rule at 100: Pairing Back the Overgrowth, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, Institute for Law and Economics, Research Paper no. 21-25,...

In 1927 the mathematician Frank Ramsey published a paper on optimal taxation in which he put forward what has come to be known as the “Ramsey rule”. Nearly one hundred years later, Ramsey’s paper remains a go-to reference for normative tax theory in a number of fields, including legal...

In the literature on optimal taxation, a “tag” is a government-observable taxpayer attribute that is effectively immutable – like blindness, race, gender, or even height. Conventional optimal tax theory prescribes that tags should be included in the tax base so long as they are in some way...

A well-known baseline result in the theory of public finance says that firm investment decisions are not distorted by income taxation when taxable income is reduced by net economic depreciation and net interest costs. This paper extends this result to the commonly encountered situation in which...

According to accepted wisdom, quot;the tax substitution argumentquot; fairly establishes that it is best to tax only labor income, and not also income from savings and investment. In this Article, I show that the tax substitution argument - which is actually a disjointed collection of arguments...

A companion paper, Sanchirico (1996), provides a probabilistic theory of learning in games with the convergence property that, almost surely, play will remain almost always (i.e., forever after some point) within one of the stage game's quot;minimal inclusive sets.quot; This paper investigates...

The design of legal obligations, whether by a public body such as a legislature or by private contract, should anticipate the enforcement process that induces compliance. Judicial enforcement is costly and imperfect, largely because of limits on the court's ability to detect facts accurately. In...