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...

This paper focuses on the relationship between tax reforms and environmental quality in Italy. First, we analyse some of the characteristics of the tax system. Within a dynamic model, we estimate the marginal distortion introduced by different taxes and show that the system is far from being...

The paper studies the effects of green tax reforms within a walrasian computable general equilibrium model of the Italian economy calibrated on a microconsistent data set derived from the Input-Output table for the year 1990. Tax reforms increase taxation on the energy sector either through an...

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...

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...

The tax-to-GDP ratio rose steadily in most EU countries up to the late 1990s, largely reflecting a sustained expansion of public sector commitments to welfare provision. Since the late 1990s, many EU countries have cut tax rates. However, the tax burden in the EU area remains much higher than in...

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of how to analyse the distributional effects of fiscal reforms. Thereby, distributional effects shall be differentiated by four subconcepts, i.e. 1.) the traditional concept of inequality, 2.) the rather novel concept of polarisation, 3.) the...

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,...

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...