In this paper we use the common perspective provided by the neoclassical growth model to evaluate the size of the distortions associated with different monetary and fiscal policies designed to finance a given sequence of government expenditures. We calibrate a neoclassical monetary economy to match important features of the U.S. economy and use it to provide a quantitative assessment of the wel...

This article shows that, contrary to the suggestion of some investment advisers, for an individual Canadian investor subject to personal income taxation, the after-tax yield on a discount bond is always higher than (or, at worst, equal to) the yield on a premium bond. * Of the Department of Economics, University of Alberta, Edmonton. We thank the editors of this journal and two anonymous review...

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Due to the overwhelming international evidence that stock prices drop by less than the dividend paid on ex-dividend days, the ex-dividend day anomaly is considered a stylized fact. Two main approaches have emerged to explain this empirical regularity: the tax-clientele hypothesis and the microstructure of financial markets. Although the most widely accepted explanation for this fact relies on t...

We present a theory concerning the realization of capital gains where ownership and control are linked as in Holmes and Schmitz (1995). The model developed is a version of a Lucas-tree economy in which the productivity of a technology depends on the ownership of the technology. The existence and uniqueness of equilibrium follow from the Contraction Mapping Theorem. The theory implies that imped...

Recent years have seen large swings in house prices in many countries. Motivated by housing price variations, proposals for taxing capital gains (nominal or real) on housing have repeatedly been put forth. The idea seems to be that such taxes would curb the redistribution occurring between those owning houses and those trying to get into the market for owner-occupied housing. Our paper shows th...

BACKGROUND How to finance progress towards universal health coverage in low-income and middle-income countries is a subject of intense debate. We investigated how alternative tax systems affect the breadth, depth, and height of health system coverage. METHODS We used cross-national longitudinal fixed effects models to assess the relationships between total and different types of tax revenue, ...

The integration of European financial markets of the 1980s created an environment of nearperfect capital mobility across countries that had harmonized indirect taxes but maintained large differences in factor taxes. The years that followed witnessed several rounds of competition in capital taxes with puzzling results. Instead of the dreaded “race to the bottom” in capital taxes, the U.K. lowere...