We consider the design of a tax on greenhouse gas emissions for the United States. We consider three major issues: the tax rate (including the use of the revenues and rate changes over time), the optimal tax base, and international trade concerns. We show that a well-designed carbon tax can capture about 80% of U.S. emissions by taxing only a few thousand taxpayers, and almost 90% with a modest...

This study examines how public and private firms in China respond to the 2008 statutory tax rate reduction from 33 percent to 25 percent. Using a proprietary dataset of private firms, we find that private firms report significantly more incomedecreasing current accruals than do public firms in 2007, the year prior to the tax rate reduction. These negative accruals were substantial and material,...

This paper quantitatively investigates the optimal capital income taxation in the general equilibrium overlapping generations model, which incorporates characteristics of housing and the U.S. preferential tax treatment for owner-occupied housing. Housing tax policy is found to have a substantial effect on how capital income should be taxed. Given the U.S. preferential tax treatment for owner-oc...

It has recently been shown that incorporating “keeping up with the Joneses”preferences into a prototypical two-ability-type optimal nonlinear income tax model leads to higher marginal tax rates for both types of agents. In particular, the high-skill type faces a positive marginal tax rate, rather than zero as in the conventional case. In this paper, agents’utility functions are postulated to ex...

An endogenous growth model is examined where individuals optimize consumption and tax evasion over time given the tax structure and tax compliance policy of the government. Applying methods of stochastic optimal control, the individual’s problem is solved and the rate of economic growth is derived. It is shown that for a given tax policy tax evasion spurs growth because it leads to higher savin...

We examine whether the level of the income tax rate and the convexity of the income tax schedule affect job mobility, as measured by moving to a better job. While the predicted effect of the level of the tax rate is ambiguous, we predict that an increase in the convexity of the tax schedule decreases job search activity by taxing away some of the benefits of a successful job search. Using data ...

By exploiting the structural tax rate changes created by the Bush-era tax acts in 2001 and 2003, this study offers a first direct investigation of how the differential taxation of financial assets affects households’ asset location and allocation into taxable and tax-deferred accounts in a natural experimental framework. Because bonds are heavily taxed assets, relative to stocks, and tax treatm...

The dual income tax combines a progressive tax on labor income and a lower flat rate tax on income from capital. Denmark, Finland, $orway, and Sweden adopted dual income taxes to address a set of tax challenges that arose in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Although developing countries face much different economic, political, and tax environments from the $ordic countries, the dual income tax m...