Capital Taxation and Electoral Accountability

Abstract

In a representative democracy, voters can use elections to protect their property by holding politicians accountable for the tax policies they implement while in office. This paper demonstrates that performance voting can - partly or wholly - solve the capital levy problem. We characterise the �best� non-expropriating tax policies that can be sustained in a stationary Markov Perfect Equilibrium; show when this coincides with the second best tax policy; and discuss, in detail, the robustness of the result.