One of the most complex issues in tax policy today is the treatment of the institutions, products, and services that make up the financial sector. It can be harder to ascertain income, expenses, and profits for financial firms than for firms selling goods and services, and it is easier for individuals and firms to manipulate financial transactions so as to exploit tax loopholes. This volume explores the challenges faced by tax policymakers and identifies modern best practices in several areas: banks, insurance companies, securities companies, investment funds, pension funds, and derivatives.

This book contains contributions from prominent practitioners and academics presenting their views on the tax levies on the financial sector from a legal and an economic perspective. (New) tax levies on the financial sector have been an ongoing subject of interest since the financial crisis of the past years. In this book, various ways of taxing the financial sector are discussed.

Analytical and empirical perspectives on the interplay of taxation and regulation in the financial sector. The global financial crisis has prompted economists to rethink fundamental questions on how governments should intervene in the financial sector. Many countries have already begun to reform the taxation and regulation of the financial sector—in the United States, for example, the Dodd–Frank Act became law in 2010; in Europe, different countries have introduced additional taxes on the sector and made substantial progress toward a banking union for the eurozone. Only recently, however, has a new field in economics emerged to study the interplay between public finance and banking. This book offers the latest thinking on the topic by American and European economists. The contributors first explore new conceptual ground, offering rigorous theoretical analyses that help us better understand how tax policy and regulation can contribute to avoiding another crisis or reducing its impact. Contributors then investigate the behavior of financial institutions in response to various forms of taxation and regulation, offering empirical evidence that is vital for policy design. Contributors Thiess Buettner, Jin Cao, Giuseppina Cannas, Gunther Capelle-Blancard, Jessica Cariboni, Brian Coulter, Ernesto Crivelli, Ruud de Mooij, Michael P. Devereux, Katharina Erbe, Ricardo Fenochietto, Marco Petracco Giudici, Timothy J. Goodspeed, Reint Gropp, Olena Havyrlchyk, Michael Keen, Lawrence L. Kreicher, Julia Lendvai, Ben Lockwood, Massimo Marchesi, Donato Masciandaro, Colin Mayer, Robert N. McCauley, Patrick McGuire, Gaëtan Nicodème, Masanori Orihara, Francesco Passarelli, Carola Pessino, Rafal Raciborski, John Vickers, Lukas Vogel, Stefano Zedda

This book examines how tax policies contributed to the financial crisis; whether taxation can play a role in the reform efforts to establish a sounder and safer financial system; and the pros and cons of various tax initiatives.

Taxing Banks Fairly offers an ethical perspective on bank taxation and financial stability to complement the traditional political economy approach. It also considers how a bank levy or financial activities tax, could be used to ensure that big banks m

The financial crisis has prompted a reconsideration of the taxation of financial institutions, with practice outstripping principle: France, Germany, the United Kingdom and several other European countries have now introduced some form of bank tax, and the U.S. administration has revived its own proposal for such a charge. This paper considers the structure, appropriate rate, and revenue yield of corrective taxation of financial institutions addressed to two externalities, consequent on excessive risk-taking, prominent in the crisis: those that arise when such institutions are simply allowed to collapse, and those that arise when, to avoid the harm this would cause, their creditors are bailed out. It also asks whether corrective taxation or a regulatory capital requirement is the better way to address these concerns. The results suggest a potential role for taxing bank borrowing, perhaps as an adjunct to minimum capital requirements, at marginal rates that rise quite sharply at low capital ratios (but are likely lower when the government cannot commit to its bailout policy), reaching levels higher than those of the bank taxes so far adopted or proposed.