| This dissertation studies three distinct theoretical and practical issues in public and international economics.;The first essay, "Capital Flight, Tax Competition and Tax Treaties," examines the effectiveness of tax treaties in overcoming tax competition that arises when governments do not possess information about the foreign-source income of their residents and therefore cannot assess the tax liabilities of those people. It initially finds that complete information exchange in a multi-country setting can effectively eliminate tax competition even without coordination of tax policies. Startlingly, however, it also finds that information exchange is totally ineffective if even one country refuses to exchange information. Finally, this essay explores the welfare implications of harmonization of tax policies among information-exchanging countries and finds that a variety of possible outcomes could rise.;The second essay, "Why Do Southern Countries Have Little Incentive to Protect Northern Intellectual Property Rights?" subsides the highly debated issue of insufficient protection by southern countries for northern intellectual property rights. This essay first points out that due to the incentive of each southern country to free-ride on protection provided by other southern countries, the overall protection provided by them is not Pareto-efficient. Therefore, a new source of mutual gains exist not only among southern countries themselves but also between the North and the South; however, a joint effort of southern countries is required to exploit these gains. This essay then analyzes the welfare implications to northern and southern countries when some but not all southern countries cooperate in exploiting the above gains. It finds that welfare implications change dramatically if a different role is played by cooperating southern countries.;The third essay, "A Mechanism-Design Approach to an Optimal Income Tax", studies how the tax authority can optimally design an income tax when it lacks information about each individual's income-earning capabilities. Previous studies of optimal income tax have adopted the first-order condition approach, which leaves individuals' income-earning capabilities in the background and has largely obscured the genuine asymmetric information problem. This essay tries to address the asymmetric information problem directly and adopts a different approach as its title suggests. In addition, this essay also tries to generalize the previous studies by introducing a more generic production function to represent income-earning capabilities. |
