International Tax and Public Finance

Copyright levies are used as a way of compensating rightholders for the private use made of their protected works. This paper builds a simple model of copyright levies and investigates welfare implications of the harmonization of levy rates. The result is that, when the policy-maker places sufficient weight on the interests of collecting societies, harmonization could reduce social welfare. When countries are asymmetric, the country with a larger proportion of foreign consumption and more inefficient tax system loses more from harmonization. A calibration exercise using European data shows that harmonization would increase aggregate social welfare. However, in some countries, policy-makers are worse off although consumers are better off with harmonization. Especially, when larger countries have higher decision weights, the policy-makers are worse off overall, and hence would not agree to harmonize the levy rates.

In this paper, we explore how the government can play a role in affecting the compensation policies of private firms in a manner that complements its income tax policies. We illustrate how this role of the government can be served by minimum wage legislation.

We study the effects of cash-flow taxation on firms’ entry and investment decisions when there is bankruptcy risk and when banks face asymmetric information problems in financing heterogeneous firms. When there is moral hazard, firms under-invest, while with adverse selection too many firms enter. Cash-flow taxation applying to both real and financial cash flows corrects these distortions by inducing more investment in rent-generating projects where moral hazard exists and reducing firm entry under adverse selection. Our results in the moral hazard case depend on the tax losses of bankrupt firms accruing to the banks. If bankrupt firms retain tax losses, the cash-flow corporate tax is neutral as in Bond and Devereux (J Public Econ 87:1291–1311, 2003).

Studies of government size usually try to identify the factors that explain what parts of economic activity are brought within the public sector and what parts are left strictly in private hands. Modern governments are now so large that the question of what determines the private/public composition, or privateness, of public expenditure is of comparable importance for understanding the role of government in society. In this paper, we use a model of the composition of public budgets to uncover the importance of electoral competitiveness and other factors in the evolution of the privateness of public expenditure across the Indian states. These states vary widely in their socioeconomic characteristics while sharing a common political heritage based on parliamentary government. New measures of public expenditure on private targetable goods and of electoral competitiveness at the Indian state level accompany the paper along with a primer on Indian public finance accounting practices in an Online Appendix. The empirical analysis shows that the degree of privateness in India’s more developed states falls substantially with greater political competition and with rising incomes, while in the less developed states it responds more weakly to these key factors and in some cases even inversely.

For a simple economic model of transfrontier pollution, widely used in theoretical studies of international treaties bearing on joint abatement, we offer in this paper a scheme for sharing national abatement costs through international financial transfers that is inspired by a classical solution concept from the theory of cooperative games—namely, the core of a game. The scheme has the following properties: total damage and abatement costs in all countries are minimized (optimality property), and no coalition or subset of countries can achieve lower total costs for its members by taking another course of action in terms of emissions or transfers, under some reasonable assumption about the reactions of those not in the coalition (core property). In the concluding section economic interpretations of the scheme are proposed, including its connection with the free-riding problem.

Motor fuel is taxed by European Union member states where purchased. This article describes (a) the case for destination-based taxation of motor fuels, (b) economic distortions, incentives for destructive tax competition, and questionable division of tax base inherent in purchase-based taxation of commercial motor fuel, (c) loss of fiscal sovereignty inherent in minimum tax rates, imposed to alleviate the first two problems, and in uniform rates, (d) the apportionment-based system employed in the US and Canada and its advantages, (e) technology to determine distance traveled in each member state, and (f) legal and political obstacles to adopting an apportionment-based system.

Social security contributions in most countries are split between employers and employees. According to standard incidence analysis, social security contributions affect employment negatively, but it is irrelevant how they are divided between employers and employees. This paper considers the possibility that (i) workers perceive a linkage between current contributions and future benefits, and (ii) they value employer’s contributions less than own contributions, as the former are less “salient.” Under these assumptions, I find that employers’ contributions have a stronger (negative) effect on employment than employees’ contributions. Furthermore, a change in how contributions are divided, which reduces the share of employers, is beneficial for employment. Finally, making employers’ contributions more visible to workers also has a positive effect on employment.