William Spencer Vickrey was a Canadian-American professor of economics and Nobel Laureate. Vickrey was awarded the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with James Mirrlees for their research into the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information, becoming the only Nobel laureate born in British Columbia.
Arthur Cecil Pigou was an English economist. As a teacher and builder of the School of Economics at the University of Cambridge, he trained and influenced many Cambridge economists who went on to take chairs of economics around the world. His work covered various fields of economics, particularly welfare economics, but also included Business cycle theory, unemployment, public finance, index numbers, and measurement of national output. His reputation was affected adversely by influential economic writers who used his work as the basis on which to define their own opposing views. He reluctantly served on several public committees, including the Cunliffe Committee and the 1919 Royal Commission on Income tax.
Public finance is the study of the role of the government in the economy. It is the branch of economics that assesses the government revenue and government expenditure of the public authorities and the adjustment of one or the other to achieve desirable effects and avoid undesirable ones. The purview of public finance is considered to be threefold, consisting of governmental effects on:
- The efficient allocation of available resources;
- The distribution of income among citizens; and
- The stability of the economy.
A progressive tax is a tax in which the tax rate increases as the taxable amount increases. The term progressive refers to the way the tax rate progresses from low to high, with the result that a taxpayer's average tax rate is less than the person's marginal tax rate. The term can be applied to individual taxes or to a tax system as a whole. Progressive taxes are imposed in an attempt to reduce the tax incidence of people with a lower ability to pay, as such taxes shift the incidence increasingly to those with a higher ability-to-pay. The opposite of a progressive tax is a regressive tax, such as a sales tax, where the poor pay a larger proportion of their income compared to the rich.
Georgism, also called in modern times Geoism, and known historically as the single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that, although people should own the value they produce themselves, the economic rent derived from land—including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations—should belong equally to all members of society. Developed from the writings of American economist and social reformer Henry George, the Georgist paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.
Sir James Alexander Mirrlees was a British economist and winner of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He was knighted in the 1997 Birthday Honours.
John Rogers Commons was an American institutional economist, Georgist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Hugh Gardner Ackley was an American economist and diplomat.
Michael Jay Boskin is the T. M. Friedman Professor of Economics and senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He also is chief executive officer and president of Boskin & Co., an economic consulting company.
Richard Abel Musgrave was an American economist of German heritage. His most cited work is The Theory of Public Finance (1959), described as "the first English-language treatise in the field," and "a major contribution to public finance thought."
Public economics is the study of government policy through the lens of economic efficiency and equity. Public economics builds on the theory of welfare economics and is ultimately used as a tool to improve social welfare.
Steven Pressman is an American economist. He is a former Professor of Economics and Finance at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. He has taught at the University of New Hampshire and Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.
Redistribution of income and wealth is the transfer of income and wealth from some individuals to others through a social mechanism such as taxation, welfare, public services, land reform, monetary policies, confiscation, divorce or tort law. The term typically refers to redistribution on an economy-wide basis rather than between selected individuals.
The Paul Shoup House, also known as the Shoup House, is a historic residence in Los Altos, Santa Clara County, California, United States. It was built as an American Craftsman- and Shingle-style home in 1910 for railroad executive Paul Shoup. In 2011 it was designated a historic site by the National Register of Historic Places; the first such designation in Los Altos.
Carl Sumner Shoup was an American economist and public finance expert. He is best known for leading the Shoup Mission of 1949-1950, tasked with revising the fiscal system of post-World War II Japan. He directly contributed to the tax codes of Canada, the United States, Japan, Europe, and South and Central America in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. He retired as professor emeritus at Columbia University.
The National Tax Association - Tax Institute of America (NTA) is a US non-profit, non-partisan organization committed to the study and discussion of public taxation, spending, and borrowing decisions by governments around the world. Since its founding in 1907, the NTA has remained the leading association of tax professionals and public finance scholars devoted to advancing the theory and practice of public finance. Its focus remains on education rather than political debate. The organization educates government officials, tax professionals, and the general public.
The benefit principle is a concept in the theory of taxation from public finance. It bases taxes to pay for public-goods expenditures on a politically-revealed willingness to pay for benefits received. The principle is sometimes likened to the function of prices in allocating private goods. In its use for assessing the efficiency of taxes and appraising fiscal policy, the benefit approach was initially developed by Knut Wicksell (1896) and Erik Lindahl (1919), two economists of the Stockholm School. Wicksell's near-unanimity formulation of the principle was premised on a just income distribution. The approach was extended in the work of Paul Samuelson, Richard Musgrave, and others. It has also been applied to such subjects as tax progressivity, corporation taxes, and taxes on property or wealth. The unanimity-rule aspect of Wicksell's approach in linking taxes and expenditures is cited as a point of departure for the study of constitutional economics in the work of James Buchanan.
Lorraine Eden is Professor Emerita of Management in the Mays Business School of Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. She also holds a joint appointment as a research professor in the Texas A&M School of Law. Dr. Eden is an expert in the field of International Transfer Pricing, which is the pricing of products that move between subunits of Multinational Enterprises (MNEs).
Robert Murray Haig was an American economist regarded as an expert in public finance and taxation. The concept of Haig–Simons income bears his name.
Fiscal sociology is the sociology of public finance, particularly tax policy. As a field, it seeks to explore the relationship that taxation constitutes between citizens and the state, including the cultural and historical factors that determine compliance with taxation. Joseph Schumpeter's 1918 work "The Crisis of the Tax State" is a founding text of fiscal sociology, though Schumpeter himself borrowed the term from the Austrian sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid's 1917 Staatssozialismus oder Staatskapitalismus. Since the 1990s, "new fiscal sociology" has analysed the foundational role of taxation as a cause, and not just an effect, of the emergence of modernity.
