This article asks whether or not the overall welfare of U.S. residents would be greater if U.S. federal law prohibited state governments from offering tax breaks to particular businesses. The answer of a formal model is yes, making such tax breaks illegal could increase a summary measure of total welfare in the economy. According to the model, the policy could increase welfare because it would ...

This article asks whether or not the overall welfare of U.S. residents would be greater if U.S. federal law prohibited state governments from offering tax breaks to particular businesses. The answer of a formal model is yes, making such tax breaks illegal could increase a summary measure of total welfare in the economy. According to the model, the policy could increase welfare because it would ...

Policy makers have long been interested in whether tax policies can be used to encourage entrepreneurial activity, but prior studies have produced ambiguous results. We use a twelveyear panel of tax return data to examine the effects of tax rates on entrepreneurial entry. We calculate household-level tax rates and employ multiple measures of entrepreneurship. Our results offer convincing eviden...

In order to reduce obesity and associated costs, policymakers are considering various policies, including taxes, to change consumers’ high-calorie consumption habits. We investigate two tax policies aimed at reducing added sweetener consumption. Both a consumption tax on sweet goods and a sweetener input tax can reach the same policy target of reducing added sweetener consumption. Both tax inst...

We use the occasion of a change in tax policy that raised the tax rate for many of the listed companies in China to examine tax-induced earnings management (TEM) from the perspective of political connections. We find that when the tax rate increased, only those affected firms with politically connected management engaged in TEM. This suggests that, in addition to motivation for managing earning...

Despite the rise of foreign portfolio investment (FPI) as a dominant international capital flow, existing international tax policy norms are largely focused on the taxation of FDI. This paper proposes a new principle global portfolio neutrality (GPN) for assessing the efficiency of tax policy towards FPI. With respect to outbound FPI, GPN entails imposing the same tax rate on domestic and forei...

This paper aims to provide a perspective on the ideal tax system using insights from optimaltax theory supplemented with empirical evidence. These insights are applied to actual policy questions regarding the progressiveness of the labor income tax, in-work tax credits, the design of the capital income tax, the taxation of housing and pensions, the role of indirect taxes, optimal environmental ...

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper uses a Finnish policy intervention to study tax competition among local governments. Changes in the statutory lower limits to the property tax rates are used as a source of exogenous variation to estimate the responses of municipalities to tax rates in their neighboring municipalities. I do not find evidence of interdependence in property tax rates among Finnish...

This paper studies the role of asset-market completeness for the properties of optimal policy. A suitable framework for this purpose is the small open economy with complete international asset markets. For in this environment changes in policy represent country-specific risk diversifiable in world markets. Our main finding is that the fundamental public finance principle whereby when taxes on a...

The equally uncharacterized nature of government role in Sub Saharan African (SSA) region on the issue of poverty reduction have surged the modest research of this study. The issue on poverty is a continuous cause and need remedies so much and fast. This study examined the effect of fiscal policy on poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa from 1999 to 2016. Pool Mean Group (PMG) was employed to...