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...

OBJECTIVES We investigate the association between an extensive set of location-specific factors and the propensity of retirement-age individuals to remain in, or relocate to, those locations. In particular we investigate whether state and local fiscal factors influence the migration decisions of retirees, and we study the relative importance of fiscal and other factors in these decisions. MET...

This paper studies how frictions, both real and financial, interact with capital tax policy in a dynamic, general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. Comparative statics show that tax policy can have substantially different effects depending upon the frictions present. Analytical and numerical exercises show that accounting for firm heterogeneity is important when evaluating the respons...

article was first presented as a working paper at a conference at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal & Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution. Thanks to the Hutchins Center and its staff for their input and support. Thanks also to participants in the NYU Law Faculty Summer Workshop, the NYU Tax Policy Colloquium, the UVA Invitational Tax Conference, the Columbia Law School Tax Policy Workshop,...

Computing the optimal portfolio policy of an investor facing capital gains tax is a challenging problem: because the tax to be paid depends on the price at which the security was purchased (the tax basis), the optimal policy is path dependent and the size of the problem grows exponentially with the number of time periods. Dammon, Spatt, and Zhang (2001, 2002a,b), Garlappi, Naik, and Slive (2001...

Despite a recent flurry of empirical research on the effects of taxes on small business activity, state-level taxes faced by entrepreneurs have been overlooked by most of the existing literature. Using a 50-state panel of tax policy information spanning the years 1989 through 2002, our analysis reveals that state tax policies generally do not appear to have quantitatively important effects on e...

This article presents the effects of alternative fiscal policies on the intertemporal government budget constraint when the time horizon of the policy maker varies. I show that the wealth effect associated with cuts in the skill-adjusted labor income tax rate improves the intertemporal budget balance, whereas the intertemporal substitution effect associated with the physical capital income tax ...

p olicy makers in housing sector seeks to use instruments by which they can control volatility of housing price and prevent high disturbances of the bubble and price shocks, or at least, reduce them. in the portfolio and speculation theories, it is emphasized that speculative demand for housing is the main cause of shocks and price volatilities in the sector. the theory of housing price bubble ...

Introduction1 Taxation measures aiding the donation of gifts or bequests to the arts are applied on a major scale in the United States. Some of these measures have formed the cornerstone of government policy towards the arts in the United States since the beginning of the twentieth century and they are defended vehemently to this day. In contrast, while such measures exist in some countries in ...

No public policy issue is more important than the structure and level of taxes. Governments have fallen because of tax reform. Proposals to extend the value-added tax (VAT) or increase its rates have caused po liti cal agitation in many countries, including Ec ua dor and Mexico. In many less-developed countries, a shortage of funds impedes development eff orts, yet attempts to increase tax reve...