The effect of tax policies and welfare state incentives on the performance of the labor market: theoretical and empirical analyses by leading European and American economists.High unemployment in many European OECD countries has been attributed to factors ranging from rigid wages and low job mobility to an interaction of high taxes and generous social benefits that may discourage labor force pa…
In this book, Peter Diamond analyzes social security as a particular example of optimal taxation theory. Assuming a world of incomplete markets and asymmetric information, he uses a variety of simple models to illuminate the economic forces that bear on specific social security policy issues. The focus is on the degree of progressivity desirable in social security and the design of incentives t…
"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 t…
A political science analysis of the feasibility and sustainability of carbon pricing, drawing from North American, European, and Asian case studies.Climate change, economists generally agree, is best addressed by putting a price on the carbon content of fossil fuels--by taxing carbon, by cap-and-trade systems, or other methods. But what about the politics of carbon pricing? Do political realiti…
Most of us think of tax as a pocketbook issue: how much we owe, how much we'll get back, how much we can deduct. In Our Selfish Tax Laws, Anthony Infanti takes a broader view, considering not just how taxes affect us individually but how the tax system reflects our culture and society. He finds that American tax laws validate and benefit those who already possess power and privilege while stark…
Concise introductions to the main issues in energy policy and their interaction with environmental policies in the EU. The European Union (EU) faces critical challenges in energy policy making, the most pressing of which are how to achieve the deep greenhouse gas reductions promised at the December 2015 UN Conference of the Parties in Paris, and how this effort can be coordinated with already e…
Why the traditional "pledge and review" climate agreements have failed, and how carbon pricing, based on trust and reciprocity, could succeed.After twenty-five years of failure, climate negotiations continue to use a "pledge and review" approach: countries pledge (almost anything), subject to (unenforced) review. This approach ignores everything we know about human cooperation. In this book, le…
Papers presented at a conference held at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, in Apr. 2006.In this work, experts on tax policy examine the complex issues involved in fundamental tax reform, including the relative merits of income-based and consumption-based taxation. Other papers consider topics such as the effect of tax reform on businesses, especially on thei…
Recent academic research findings on topics relating to taxation and social insurance policy, including the implicit tax imposed by Medicaid on private long-term care insurance benefits, an alternative system of unemployment insurance, and federal energy tax policy.This NBER series presents current academic research findings in the areas of taxation and government spending. The papers included …
A guide to current approaches to measuring the effective tax rate, with case studies that illustrate the different methods discussed.Today's highly complicated tax codes have led economists and policy makers depend on simplified summary measures in order to understand how taxes affect the economy. Studies of the effective tax rate--that is, a measurement of the net amount of tax levied on certa…