We have stressed that tax incidence must be traced to people, since corporations cannot bear the burden of a tax. Why then tax corporations at all? There are several possible justi…cations. First, there are valuable bene…ts, such as limited liability, to incorporation. The corporate tax could be seen as simply a tax on that value. However, the current corporate tax system does not re‡ect a sens...

Historically, the Islamic state collected zakat (similar to the tithe of other regions) as national income. In Indonesia, the private sector can raise zakat funds more effectively than the government. In 2010, zakat became tax-deductible income. This paper tries to analyze some factors that affect preference for zakat as a tax deduction in Indonesia. The effectiveness of the regulation is also ...

We study corporate income tax competition when firms operating in multiple jurisdictions can shift income using financial planning strategies. Several such strategies, particularly intra-corporate lending, appear to be actively pursued by companies to reduce subnational corporate taxes in Canada. A simple theoretical model shows how interjurisdictional tax planning can give rise to asymmetries ...

This paper analyzes the effect of repatriation taxes on dividend payments by the foreign affiliates of American multinational firms. The United States taxes the foreign incomes of American companies, grants credits for any foreign income taxes paid, and defers any taxes due on the unrepatriated earnings for those affiliates that are separately incorporated abroad. This system thereby imposes re...

We develop a multi-community urban land use framework to investigate the implications of increasing school choice opportunities on educational and residential choices of a city’s residents. When deciding on the location and the size of land, the households care about the distance to the business district, and a local public good: education. There is a private education alternative that breaks t...

This paper presents a model of an urban area with local income taxes used to finance a local public good. Households differ in both incomes and their taste for housing. The existence of an asymetric equilibrium is shown in a calibrated two-community model assuming single-peaked distributions for income and housing taste. The equilibrium features segregation of households by both incomes and tas...

This paper uses a new, large-scale, dynamic life-cycle simulation model to compare the welfare and macroeconomic effects of five fundamental alternatives to the U.S. federal income tax: a proportional income tax, a proportional consumption tax, a flat tax, a flat tax with transition relief, and a progressive variant of the flat tax called the X tax. The model incorporates intragenerational hete...

Dual income tax systems can suffer from income that shifts from progressively taxed labour income to capital income, which is taxed at a lower, flat rate. This paper empirically examines the 1993 Finnish dual income tax reform, which radically reduced the marginal tax rates on capital income for some, but not all, taxpayers. We measure how overall taxable income and the relative shares of capit...

For the standard specification of the utilitarian optimal income tax problem with hidden characteristics, the paper shows that randomized tax schemes are undesirable if preferences exhibit a property of weakly decreasing risk aversion according to the multidimensional risk aversion concept of Hellwig (2004). The property of decreasing risk aversion also implies uniqueness of the optimal income ...

State governments have traditionally raised revenue from business by taxing corporate income. But in recent years the growing difficulty of administering state corporate income taxes has prompted a search for alternative ways of taxing companies. This search for new business taxes has ironically sparked a resurgence in one of the world’s oldest broad-based tax structures: the gross receipts tax...