From Optimal Tax Theory to Tax Policy PDF Download

Author: Robin Boadway
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262300931
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
An economist examines the evolution of optimal tax analysis and its influence on tax policy design. Many things inform a country's choice of tax system, including political considerations, public opinion, bureaucratic complexities, and ideas drawn from theoretical analysis. In this book, Robin Boadway examines the role of optimal tax analysis in informing and influencing tax policy design. Scholars of public economics formulate models of optimal tax-transfer systems based on normative principles that reflect efficiency and equity considerations. They use that analysis to form views about the optimal design or reform of actual tax systems that are much more complicated than their models. Boadway argues that there is an important symbiosis between ideas drawn from normative tax analysis and tax policies actually enacted. Ideas germinated by normative analyses have led to the widespread adoption of the value-added tax, the use of refundable tax credits, and various business tax reforms. Other ideas provide rationales for existing features of tax systems, including the tax treatment of retirement savings and human capital investment. Boadway charts the evolution of optimal tax analysis and discusses the lessons it holds for tax policy. He describes the theoretical challenges posed by recent findings in such fields as behavioral economics and social choice and considers how optimal tax analysis might adapt to these new paradigms. His analysis offers a timely assessment of the role that optimal tax theory has played in establishing the principles that continue to inform tax policy.

Author: Narayana R. Kocherlakota
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400835275
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Optimal tax design attempts to resolve a well-known trade-off: namely, that high taxes are bad insofar as they discourage people from working, but good to the degree that, by redistributing wealth, they help insure people against productivity shocks. Until recently, however, economic research on this question either ignored people's uncertainty about their future productivities or imposed strong and unrealistic functional form restrictions on taxes. In response to these problems, the new dynamic public finance was developed to study the design of optimal taxes given only minimal restrictions on the set of possible tax instruments, and on the nature of shocks affecting people in the economy. In this book, Narayana Kocherlakota surveys and discusses this exciting new approach to public finance. An important book for advanced PhD courses in public finance and macroeconomics, The New Dynamic Public Finance provides a formal connection between the problem of dynamic optimal taxation and dynamic principal-agent contracting theory. This connection means that the properties of solutions to principal-agent problems can be used to determine the properties of optimal tax systems. The book shows that such optimal tax systems necessarily involve asset income taxes, which may depend in sophisticated ways on current and past labor incomes. It also addresses the implications of this new approach for qualitative properties of optimal monetary policy, optimal government debt policy, and optimal bequest taxes. In addition, the book describes computational methods for approximate calculation of optimal taxes, and discusses possible paths for future research.

Author: Louis Kaplow
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069114821X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 494

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Book Description
The Theory of Taxation and Public Economics presents a unified conceptual framework for analyzing taxation--the first to be systematically developed in several decades. An original treatment of the subject rather than a textbook synthesis, the book contains new analysis that generates novel results, including some that overturn long-standing conventional wisdom. This fresh approach should change thinking, research, and teaching for decades to come. Building on the work of James Mirrlees, Anthony Atkinson and Joseph Stiglitz, and subsequent researchers, and in the spirit of classics by A. C. Pigou, William Vickrey, and Richard Musgrave, this book steps back from particular lines of inquiry to consider the field as a whole, including the relationships among different fiscal instruments. Louis Kaplow puts forward a framework that makes it possible to rigorously examine both distributive and distortionary effects of particular policies despite their complex interactions with others. To do so, various reforms--ranging from commodity or estate and gift taxation to regulation and public goods provision--are combined with a distributively offsetting adjustment to the income tax. The resulting distribution-neutral reform package holds much constant while leaving in play the distinctive effects of the policy instrument under consideration. By applying this common methodology to disparate subjects, The Theory of Taxation and Public Economics produces significant cross-fertilization and yields solutions to previously intractable problems.

Author: Mr.Gian Milesi-Ferretti
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1451848234
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description
The effects of income and consumption taxation are examined in the context of models in which the growth process is driven by the accumulation of human and physical capital. The different channels through which these taxes affect economic growth are discussed, and it is shown that in general the taxation of factor incomes (human and physical capital) is growth-reducing. The effects of consumption taxation on growth depend crucially on the elasticity of labor supply, and therefore on the specification of the leisure activity. The paper also derives some implications for the optimal intertemporal choice of tax instruments.

Author: Alberto Bucci
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030215997
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
This edited collection explores the links between human capital (both in the form of health and in the form of education), demographic change, and economic growth. Using empirical as well as theoretical perspectives, the authors investigate several important issues in the context of human capital, namely population ageing, inequality, public policy, and long-term economic development. Ultimately, they demonstrate that the accumulation of human capital is of crucial importance to long-run economic growth.

Author: Matti Tuomala
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198753411
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
Tax systems raise large amounts of revenue for funding public sector's activities, and tax/transfer policy, together with public provision of education, health care, and social services, play a crucial role in treating the symptoms and the causes of poverty. The normative analysis is crucial for tax/transfer design because it makes it possible to assess separately how changes in the redistributive criterion of the government, and changes in the size of the behavioural responses to taxes and transfers, affect the optimal tax/transfer system. Optimal tax theory provides a way of thinking rigorously about these trade-offs. Written primarily for graduate students and researchers, this volume is intended as a textbook and research monograph, connecting optimal tax theory to tax policy. It comments on some policy recommendations of the Mirrlees Review, and builds on the authors work on public economics, optimal tax theory, behavioural public economics, and income inequality. The book explains in depth the Mirrlees model and presents various extensions of it. The first set of extensions considers changing the preferences for consumption and work: behavioural-economic modifications (such as positional externalities, prospect theory, paternalism, myopic behaviour and habit formation) but also heterogeneous work preferences (besides differences in earnings ability). The second set of modifications concerns the objective of the government. The book explains the differences in optimal redistributive tax systems when governments - instead of maximising social welfare - minimise poverty or maximise social welfare based on rank order or charitable conservatism social welfare functions. The third set of extensions considers extending the Mirrlees income tax framework to allow for differential commodity taxes, capital income taxation, public goods provision, public provision of private goods, and taxation commodities that generate externalities. The fourth set of extensions considers incorporating a number of important real-word extensions such as tagging of tax schedules to certain groups of tax payers. In all extensions, the book illustrates the main mechanisms using advanced numerical simulations.

Author: Stuart Adam
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199553742
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 552

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Book Description
Based on the findings of a commission chaired by James Mirrlees, this volume presents a coherent picture of tax reform whose aim is to identify the characteristics of a good tax system for any open developed economy, assess the extent to which the UK tax system conforms to these ideals, and recommend how it might be reformed in that direction.

Author: Reuven S. Avi-Yonah
Publisher: Kluwer Law International B.V.
ISBN: 9041161449
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Migration has become an increasingly important phenomenon for societies, especially given its highly controversial political dimension. The complexity of the migrant integration process and its many varieties present challenges to policymakers who need high-quality information on which to base decisions. Nowhere is this necessity more pressing than in the development of relevant tax rules that meet the basic requirements of efficiency and equity. Moreover, the ascent of the so-called emerging economies coupled with the stagnation of the richest economies of the world implies reform of the current competition-based international tax regime and the adoption of a more cooperative paradigm. This important and timely book, for the first time in such depth, explores such aspects of the problem as the following: - migration for tax reasons, especially corporate "inversions" (change in corporate residence for tax purposes); - tax consequences related to individuals who receive free or subsidized education in one country and profit from it in another; - taxing cross-border retirement income; and - migration-related aspects of tax preferential treatment of the elderly. With particular emphasis on the effects and opportunities created by the changing international tax regime - and with attention to the role of tax treaties and recent court cases - chapters by well known tax experts present evidence on the consequences of migration in all its facets and simulate the effects of several recently enacted and proposed changes in tax law in European countries, the United States, and other jurisdictions. The grounded propositions and recommendations offered in this deeply informed book will allow policymakers to draft tax-residence rules that minimize distortion and promote fairness. The book will also be of interest to tax law practitioners and other tax specialists, migration experts, and academics investigating one of the crucial political issues of our time.

Author: Zuliu Hu
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
ISBN: 1451947429
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 22

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Book Description
What are the effects of taxation on individual/entrepreneurs’ risk-taking behavior? This paper re-examines this old question in a continuous time life-cycle model. We demonstrate that the stream of uncertain income from human capital has systematic effects on demand for the risky physical capital asset. If labor supply is inelastic and real wages are known with certainty, then a labor income tax will reduce holdings of the risky physical asset. However, if there are random fluctuations in labor income, then the effect depends on the nature of interaction between wage risk and investment income risk. A labor income tax may actually raise demand for the risky capital asset if human capital risk and physical capital risk are positively correlated. The idiosyncratic risk and nontradability of human capital also have implications for optimal taxation. When the insurance and disincentive effects are jointly taken into account, a Pareto efficient tax structure implies a strictly positive tax rate.

Author: Larry E. Jones
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Capital gains tax
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description
One of the best known results in modern public finance is the Chamley-Judd result showing that the optimal tax rate on capital income is zero in the long-run. In this paper, we reexamine this result by analyzing a series of generalizations of the Chamley-Judd formulation. We show that in a model with human capital, if the tax code is sufficiently rich and there are no pure profits from accumulating human capital, then all distorting taxes are zero in the long-run under the optimal plan. In this sense, income from physical capital is not special. To gain a better understanding of these two conditions, we study examples in which they are not satisfied and show that the optimal tax rate on income from physical capital does not go to zero. In those cases where the limiting tax rate is non-zero, we calculate its value for alternative specifications of the marginal welfare cost of taxation. Our results indicate that even for conservative specifications, tax rates of 10% and higher are possible under the optimal code.