The Mirrlees Review is an ambitious and comprehensive analysis of the British tax system with detailed recommendations for reform. This review essay focuses on those issues that are also likely to be of interest to an American reader. The Review has the technical sophistication that readers would expect from a team of ten economists, chaired by James Mirrlees, the distinguished theorist who received the Nobel Prize for his contributions to the theory of optimal taxation. But it is written for a broader audience, explaining concepts like deadweight loss and the elasticity of tax revenue with respect to tax rates and doing so without any mathematics. (JEL D64, E21, E62, H24, H25)

In this essay, I explain my reasons for the following policy recommendations: (1) The Fed should continue to manage monetary policy as it has in the past, should act as the nation's lender of last resort, should fully supervise the large bank holding companies and their subsidiary banks, and should be given resolution authority over the institutions that it supervises. (2) While a council of supervisors and regulators can play a useful role in dealing with macro prudential risks, it should not replace the central role of the Federal Reserve. (3) The virtually unlimited lending powers that the Fed has recently exercised in creating credit and helping individual institutions should be restricted in duration and subjected to formal Treasury approval backed by Congressional preauthorization of funds. (4) The Fed's capital rules for commercial banks need to be strengthened by replacing the existing risk-based capital approach with a broader definition of risk and the introduction of contingent capital. (5) Subjecting mortgage lending to a broader range of Federal Reserve regulations and allowing the Fed to deal with nonbank creators of mortgage products would be better than the creation of a new consumer financial protection organization. (JEL E52, E58, G21, G28)

Journal Article Incidence of a Capital Income Tax in a Growing Economy with Variable Savings Rates Get access Martin Feldstein Martin Feldstein Harvard University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 41, Issue 4, October 1974, Pages 505–513, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296700 Published: 01 October 1974

The optimal level of Social Security benefits depends on balancing the protection that these benefits offer to those who have not provided adequately for their own old age against the welfare costs of distorting economic behavior. The primary such cost is the distortion in private saving. The present paper derives the level of Social Security benefits that is optimal in three basic cases. In the first section of the paper, the optimal level of benefits is derived for an economy in which all individuals do not anticipate retirement at all and therefore do not save. The second and third sections then derive the optimal benefits for economies with two different definitions of attitudes toward retirement and saving.

Inflation,

change in the quality of care is primarily due to the increased demand caused by the growth of private and public insurance. The paper presents an analytic model of the hospital industry in which quality affects the demand for hospital services and in which the purchase of private insurance is endogenous. Estimates of key equations of the model based on a cross-section of time series for the individual states for the years 1958 through 1973 are presented. The price adjustment process and dynamic multipliers are discussed. THE COST OF A DAY of hospital care in the United States has increased 600 per cent in the past twenty years, an annual rate of more than 9 per cent. During the

[Although the theory of taxation and portfolio choice has been extensively developed, the current paper begins the econometric study of this subject. The research analyzes the composition of portfolios of 1,799 households in a sample in which high income individuals are greatly overrepresented. The results show that the personal income tax has a very powerful effect on individuals' demands for portfolio assets after adjusting for the effects of net worth, age, sex, and the ratio of human to nonhuman capital.]

Traditional analyses of the income tax greatly underestimate deadweight losses by ignoring its effect on forms of compensation and patterns of consumption. The full deadweight loss is easily calculated using the compensated elasticity of taxable income to changes in tax rates because leisure, excludable income, and deductible consumption are a Hicksian composite good. Microeconomic estimates imply a deadweight loss of as much as 30% of revenue or more than ten times Harberger's classic 1964 estimate. The relative deadweight loss caused by increasing existing tax rates is substantially greater and may exceed $2 per $1 of revenue.