Because of endogeneity problems very few studies have been able to identify the incidence of corporate taxes on wages. We circumvent these problems by using an 11-year panel of data on 11,441 German municipalities’ tax rates, 8 percent of which change each year, linked to administrative matched employer-employee data. Consistent with our theoretical model, we find a negative effect of corporate...

ARIFF reductions, falling transport costs, and reduced barriers to international capital flows have created extensive opportunities for multinational firms operating in increasingly integrated global markets. In the midst of rapid integration and globalization, firms still face tax systems that differ among countries, and these differences have the potential to affect major investment and finan...

The present study examines how the degree of progressivity of the U.S. Federal Income Tax has changed over time (from 1929 through 2009). Data from the Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Census Bureau, and Bureau of Economic Analysis is used to construct “tax concentration curves” and “income concentration curves” (of which the well known Lorenz Curve is an example) for each year during this time p...

Analyzing voting on income taxation usually implies mathematically cumbersome models. Moreover, a majority voting winner does not usually exist in such setups. Therefore, it is important to mathematically describe those cases in which a majority winner exists, at least for the basic models of voting on income taxation. We provide a complete mathematical description of those income distribution ...

Sarah A. Roache and Lawrence O. Gostin’s recent editorial comprehensively presents soda taxation rationales from a public health perspective. While we essentially agree that soda taxes are gaining momentum, this commentary expands upon the need for a better understanding of the policy processes underlying their development and implementation. Indeed, the umbrella concept of soda taxation actual...

Despite the intensifying debate over the taxation of Internet commerce, the relevant issues have not been given a systematic treatment in the context of the literature on optimal taxation. This article presents such an analysis and investigates separately the taxation of business purchases of intermediate goods, the taxation of consumer purchases of final goods and services, and the various iss...

We utilize a simple overlapping generations model with a balanced budget rule to study the effect of distortionary taxation on cycles and local stability of equilibria. We show that under proportional taxation there is a critical tax rate above which cycles will vanish, while in the case of linearly progressive taxation there is a critical level of exemption below which cycles will vanish as we...

We set up an OLG-model, where households choose human capital investment and decide on investing their endogenous savings in a portfolio of riskless and risky assets. Thereby, the households are exposed to both aggregate wage and capital risks due to technological shocks. We derive the optimal public policy mix of taxation and education policy and show that risks can be optimally diversified on...

Spatial patterns in (local) government taxation and spending decisions have received a lot of scholarly attention recently. Still, the focus on taxation or expenditure levels in previous studies is incomplete. In fact, (rational) individuals are likely to consider the level of spending on (or taxation for) public goods provision simultaneously with how much public goods they actually receive – ...