We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justi…cation for capital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to be nonlinear functions of income and consumption and show that a relationship between ability and preferences over goods provides a novel reason for sophisticated distortionary ...

In this paper we investigate the behavior of an overlapping dynasties growth model with factor taxation to determine how much the natives of a country absorbing a flow of immigrants can use shifts in factor taxation or deficit finance to redistribute immigrant income to themselves. In an economy in which government expenditure is a fixed share of net national product, policy-makers can minimize...

This paper examines information sharing between governments in an optimal taxation framework. We present a taxonomy of alternative systems of international capital income taxation and characterize the choice of tax rates and information exchange. The model reproduces the conclusion of the previous literature that integration of international capital markets may lead to the under-provision of pu...

This paper examines optimal factor taxation when output is produced from labour and capital and some (or all) households save capital. It is shown that there is a reputational equilibrium in which the government has no incentive to change its announced tax policies. In this equilibrium, the Judd-Chamley assertion that the tax on capital income tends to zero in the limit holds. This is independe...

This paper develops a theoretical model of corporate taxation in the presence of …nancially integrated multinational …rms. Under the assumption that multinational …rms at least partly use internal loans to …nance foreign investment, we …nd that the optimal corporate tax rate is positive from the perspective of a small, open economy. This …nding contrasts the standard result that the optimal sou...

This paper studies optimal Ramsey taxation when risk sharing in private insurance markets is imperfect due to limited enforcement. In a limited commitment economy, there are externalities associated with capital and labor because individuals do not take into account that their labor and saving decisions affect aggregate labor and capital supply and wages, and thus the value of autarky. Therefor...

The net effects of switching from consumption taxation to inflation taxation on resource allocation and welfare crucially depend on production externalities. With elastic labor supply, raising inflation taxation decreases leisure, but increases the levels of real consumption, capital, and output. Moreover, this tax switch has two opposing effects on the level of real money balances: A positive ...

We study the role of anonymous markets in which trades cannot be monitored by the government. We adopt a Mirrlees approach to analyze economies in which agents have private information and a benevolent government controls optimal redistributive tax policy. While unrestricted access to anonymous markets reduces the set of policy instruments available to the government, it also limits the scope o...