How should capital income be taxed to achieve efficiency and equity? In this detailed study, tax policy analyst Jane Gravelle, brings together comprehensive estimates of effective tax rates on a wide variety of capital by type, industry, legal form, method of financing, and across time. These estimates are combined with a history and survey of issues regarding capital income taxation that are aimed especially at bringing the findings of economic theory and recent empirical research to nonspecialists and policymakers. Many of the topics treated have been the subject of policy debate and legislation over the last ten or fifteen years.Should capital income be taxed at all? And, if capital income is to be taxed, what is the best way to do it? Gravelle devotes two chapters to the first question, and then, in answer to the second question, covers a broad range of topics - corporate taxation, tax neutrality, capital gains taxes, tax treatment of retirement savings, and capital income taxation and international competitiveness. Gravelle also includes a comprehensive history of tax institutions and data on constructing effective tax rates that are not available elsewhere.

This monograph investigates the intersectoral, international, and intertemporal allocation effects of alternative systems of capital income taxation characterized by different degrees of integration between corporate and personal taxation, depreciation rules, provisions for interest deductibility, and the like. The systems studied include those of the OECD countries as well as proposed systems advocated by various authors and tax committees. In contrast to the ''Harberger literature'', the book provides a microfoundation for the analysis of tax distortions. It is not assumed that the various components of capital income taxation can be lumped together as an ''effective tax rate'' that captures all the information relevant for assessing the distortions. Instead, the allocative roles of these components are explicitly derived from the households' and firms' optimization problems. Much emphasis is placed on the tax-induced interaction between the firms' real and financial decisions, and it is argued that this interaction fundamentally changes the nature of many of the tax distortions traditionally claimed for the real economy, sometimes even reversing their direction. All allocative results are derived from market equilibrium models. The distortion in the process of capital accumulation, for example, is studied in a perfect foresight intertemporal general equilibrium model with infinitely lived firms and households which is a decentralized version of the neoclassical model of optimal economic growth. Although basically theoretical, the book has a strong policy orientation and comments on a number of issues that are of current political concern. Particular attention is paid to the 1981 and 1986 U.S. tax reforms. It is argued that the 1981 reform was a major cause of the disturbances in international capital markets which troubled the world economy at the beginning of the eighties and that the 1986 policy of 'tax cut cum base broadening' will stimulate economic growth, but induce capital flight from the United States into the rest of the world.

In recent years, the Federal Reserve and central banks worldwide have enjoyed remarkable success in their battle against inflation. The challenge now confronting the Fed and its counterparts is how to proceed in this newly benign economic environment: Should monetary policy seek to maintain a rate of low-level inflation or eliminate inflation altogether in an effort to attain full price stability? In a seminal article published in 1997, Martin Feldstein developed a framework for calculating the gains in economic welfare that might result from a move from a low level of inflation to full price stability. The present volume extends that analysis, focusing on the likely costs and benefits of achieving price stability not only in the United States, but in Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom as well. The results show that even small changes in already low inflation rates can have a substantial impact on the economic performance of different countries, and that variations in national tax rules can affect the level of gain from disinflation.

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.

Research on capital formation has long been a major focus of studies sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research because of the crucial role of capital accumulation in the process of economic growth. The papers in this volume examine the influence of taxes on capital formation, with specific focus on the determinants of saving and the process of investment in plant and equipment.

The question of whether to tax income from wealth has sparked debate since our country's inception. Does taxing capital income ensure the progressivity of our system or merely discourage saving? Would switching our tax code to one that taxes only consumption be more efficient or only burden middle- and low-income people? And if we were to radically reform the way America taxes its citizens, how could we ensure that vital revenue would not be lost? Some analysts would even argue that, under our present byzantine tax system, we don't really tax capital income at all. In this volume, eminent economists analyze the problems associated with taxing capital income and propose policy solutions, which are then challenged by their peers in informed commentary. It may not settle the debate, but policymakers, scholars, and the public will find a wealth of information and ideas to consider.