Tax Systems

Tax Systems PDF Author: Joel Slemrod
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262319012
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
An approach to taxation that goes beyond an emphasis on tax rates to consider such aspects as administration, compliance, and remittance. Despite its theoretical elegance, the standard optimal tax model has significant limitations. In this book, Joel Slemrod and Christian Gillitzer argue that tax analysis must move beyond the emphasis on optimal tax rates and bases to consider such aspects of taxation as administration, compliance, and remittance. Slemrod and Gillitzer explore what they term a tax-systems approach, which takes tax evasion seriously; revisits the issue of remittance, or who writes the check to cover tax liability (employer or employee, retailer or consumer); incorporates administrative and compliance costs; recognizes a range of behavioral responses to tax rates; considers nonstandard instruments, including tax base breadth and enforcement effort; and acknowledges that tighter enforcement is sometimes a more socially desirable way to raise revenue than an increase in statutory tax rates. Policy makers, Slemrod and Gillitzer argue, would be well advised to recognize the interrelationship of tax rates, bases, enforcement, and administration, and acknowledge that tax policy is really tax-systems policy.

Tax Systems

Tax Systems PDF Author: Joel Slemrod
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262319012
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
An approach to taxation that goes beyond an emphasis on tax rates to consider such aspects as administration, compliance, and remittance. Despite its theoretical elegance, the standard optimal tax model has significant limitations. In this book, Joel Slemrod and Christian Gillitzer argue that tax analysis must move beyond the emphasis on optimal tax rates and bases to consider such aspects of taxation as administration, compliance, and remittance. Slemrod and Gillitzer explore what they term a tax-systems approach, which takes tax evasion seriously; revisits the issue of remittance, or who writes the check to cover tax liability (employer or employee, retailer or consumer); incorporates administrative and compliance costs; recognizes a range of behavioral responses to tax rates; considers nonstandard instruments, including tax base breadth and enforcement effort; and acknowledges that tighter enforcement is sometimes a more socially desirable way to raise revenue than an increase in statutory tax rates. Policy makers, Slemrod and Gillitzer argue, would be well advised to recognize the interrelationship of tax rates, bases, enforcement, and administration, and acknowledge that tax policy is really tax-systems policy.

The New Dynamic Public Finance

The New Dynamic Public Finance PDF 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.

Policy and Choice

Policy and Choice PDF Author: William J. Congdon
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815704984
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Argues that public finance--the study of the government's role in economics--should incorporate principles from behavior economics and other branches of psychology.

Optimal Redistributive Taxation

Optimal Redistributive Taxation PDF 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.

The Undeserving Rich

The Undeserving Rich PDF Author: Leslie McCall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107355230
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
It is widely assumed that Americans care little about income inequality, believe opportunities abound, admire the rich, and dislike redistributive policies. Leslie McCall contends that such assumptions are based on both incomplete survey data and economic conditions of the past and not present. In fact, Americans have desired less inequality for decades, and McCall's book explains why. Americans become most concerned about inequality in times of inequitable growth, when they view the rich as prospering while opportunities for good jobs, fair pay and high quality education are restricted for everyone else. As a result, they favor policies to expand opportunity and redistribute earnings in the workplace, reducing inequality in the market rather than redistributing income after the fact with tax and spending policies. This book resolves the paradox of how Americans can express little enthusiasm for welfare state policies and still yearn for a more equitable society, and forwards a new model of preferences about income inequality rooted in labor market opportunities rather than welfare state policies.

Conditional Cash Transfers

Conditional Cash Transfers PDF Author: Ariel Fiszbein
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821373536
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs aim to reduce poverty by making welfare programs conditional upon the receivers' actions. That is, the government only transfers the money to persons who meet certain criteria. These criteria may include enrolling children into public schools, getting regular check-ups at the doctor's office, receiving vaccinations, or the like. They have been hailed as a way of reducing inequality and helping households break out of a vicious cycle whereby poverty is transmitted from one generation to another. Do these and other claims make sense? Are they supported by the available empirical evidence? This volume seeks to answer these and other related questions. Specifically, it lays out a conceptual framework for thinking about the economic rationale for CCTs; it reviews the very rich evidence that has accumulated on CCTs; it discusses how the conceptual framework and the evidence on impacts should inform the design of CCT programs in practice; and it discusses how CCTs fit in the context of broader social policies. The authors show that there is considerable evidence that CCTs have improved the lives of poor people and argue that conditional cash transfers have been an effective way of redistributing income to the poor. They also recognize that even the best-designed and managed CCT cannot fulfill all of the needs of a comprehensive social protection system. They therefore need to be complemented with other interventions, such as workfare or employment programs, and social pensions.

The Economics of Taxation

The Economics of Taxation PDF Author: Bernard SalaniƩ
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262194860
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A graduate-level introduction to the economic theories of taxation.

Charitable Giving and Tax Policy

Charitable Giving and Tax Policy PDF Author: Gabrielle Fack
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198723660
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 163

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Book Description
A comparative and historical analysis of tax policies towards charitable giving in different countries that considers whether public policies actually boost private philanthropy.

The The Indirect Side of Direct Investment

The The Indirect Side of Direct Investment PDF Author: Jack M. Mintz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262014491
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
Drawing on a unique data set (MiDi) on German multinationals provided by the Deutsche Bundesbank in Frankfurt, Mintz and Weichenrieder confirm the prevalence of indirect financing structures for both outbound and inbound German investment. They find evidence of "treaty shopping!' to avoid withholding taxes (using a third country with more favorable tax rates as a conduit through which to route investments) and of "debt shifting." --

Economics Rules

Economics Rules PDF Author: Dani Rodrik
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0198736894
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
A leading economist trains a lens on his own discipline to uncover when it fails and when it works.