This paper examines elements of British tax policy and discusses their implications for the US, where several recent proposals would mirror aspects of the British system. These include reducing filing requirements under the individual income tax, indexing capital gains for inflation, cutting mortgage interest deductions, enacting a value added tax, and integrating the corporate and personal inc...

Recent studies have shown that adding a short extension to a long-only tax exempt equity portfolio leads to a more efficient portfolio. In this work, we show that these extended mandates are even more effective for investors subject to taxes. Not only is the portfolio more efficiently positioned from a pretax perspective, but it offers significant after-tax benefits from increased loss harvesti...

Value-added Tax versus Social Security Contributions In order to alleviate unemployment it is often recommended to reduce social security contributions (SSC) and to compensate for the ensuing loss in revenues by a rise in the value-added tax (VAT). Assuming unemployment to be caused by efficiency wages, it is shown that a balanced-budget shift from a payroll tax to a VAT will increase employmen...

Value-added tax (VAT) is the core transaction tax for most countries. It involves every process of production and consumption along the value chain, and requires not only administrative capacity on behalf of the government entity (revenue authority), but also on the part of the private sector through accounting and reporting. As such, the implementation and structure of the VAT have direct impl...

Policies to harmonize value-added tax rates are controversial in the European Union. This paper formulates a multi-country model over a one-dimensional space as a non-cooperative Nash game, in which each country aims at maximizing its tax revenue, subject to the constraint that its tax rate lies within a given common band. Then we examine the e4ects of changes in the common band on tax rates, t...