Government tax policy has a profound effect on the temporal composition and on the intertemporal evolution of the macro economy. In contemporary terms it must allow non-inflationary financing of the proper functions of government. The main function of a tax system is to raise enough revenue to...

In this paper, we evaluate and critique ten principal claims made in recent debates on the estate tax, distinguishing five types of statements: facts, rhetoric, value judgments, economic reasoning, and informed speculation. Economics cannot fully resolve policy debats because economic knowledge...

The Netherlands has abolished the tax on actual personal capital income and has replaced it by a presumptive capital income tax, which is in fact a net wealth tax. This paper contrasts this wealth tax with a conventional realization-based capital gains tax, a retrospective capital gains tax with...

This paper explores how revenue-neutral tax reforms impact employment and economic growth in a model of endogenous growth and search frictions on the labor market. We analyze how savings and the incentive to create new jobs are affected by tax swaps between wage income taxes, payroll taxes,...

This paper analyzes the effects that differential tax treatment of married and single individuals has on marriage behavior, using a modified version of the two-sided search model of Burdett and Wright (1998). The main results are the following: i) although an increase in the "marriage tax"...

This paper utilizes the 1992 household budget survey of Bulgaria to show the poor revenue effects of the income tax structure prevailing in 1992 which did not take into account the underlying distribution of income. We also show that Bulgaria can benefit from a much simpler and lower income tax...

This Congressional testimony has two parts. Part I discusses the implications that choice of rationale for the charitable deduction has on reform options such as credits, caps, a nonitemizer deduction, scope of eligible donees, and deducting unrealized appreciation. Part II concerns the...

Property tax limits are a subject of continual interest among policy makers. Indiana recently implemented tax caps that limit individual property tax burdens to a fixed percentage of market value. The resulting system creates structural deficits that depend on the simultaneous spending choices...

This paper explores how revenue-neutral tax reforms impact employment and economic growth in models of exogenous and endogenous growth and search frictions on the labor market. We show that (i) a cut in the payroll tax financed by an increase in the wage tax lowers both equilibrium employment...

This paper analyses the development of taxes on corporate income in EU and G7 countries over the last two decades. We establish a number of stylised facts about their development. Tax-cutting and base-broadening reforms have had the effect that, on average across EU and G7 countries, effective...