Putting Firms into Optimal Tax Theory
指出最优税收理论长期忽视企业角色，而现实中企业是税收征管的核心。作者提出一个包含企业的新框架，用于分析零售税与增值税等政策问题。
Firms are, for the most part, absent from the modern theory of optimal taxation. Their disappearance dates from the foundational models developed by Peter A. Diamond and James A. Mirrlees (1971) in which firms are simply mechanical vehicles for combining productive inputs into output in cost-minimizing proportions. In contrast, firms play a central role in all modern tax systems, mostly for a reason stated by Richard M. Bird (1996): “The key to effective taxation is information, and the key to information in the modern economy is the corporation.” In most countries, firms remit the majority of tax revenues to the government, either with regard to taxes legally owed by businesses or through withholding of taxes legally owed by employees or other businesses. Even when businesses are not required to remit taxes, they are often required to file information reports that can facilitate monitoring of tax liabilities. The lack of a theoretical framework that features firms impedes rigorous welfare analysis of a number of important policy issues. One such example is the comparative evaluation of a uniform retail sales tax (RST) versus a value added tax (VAT). In the standard model, these two taxes—both remitted entirely by businesses— are equivalent consumption taxes, but most experts consider the VAT to be clearly superior on administrative grounds, a view echoed in the recent report of the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform (2005). We propose a simple framework in which these and other issues can be analyzed. The new framework recognizes that a tax code must be backed up by an administrative and enforcement structure.