This article studies determinants of some aspects of the structure of cities, including density and the price of land and housing. We use a version of the Alonso‐Muth‐Mills model, calibrated to broadly match some of the features of a representative large city. Although the calibrated model omits many real‐world features, it can nonetheless be used to explore the impact of factors such as: (i) the provision of transport infrastructure; (ii) zoning policies that limit housing density; (iii) frictions on the production of housing; and (iv) population size. The empirical section of the article shows that the model is consistent with some empirical regularities for large Australian cities. The results of the article draw attention to structural factors that may have contributed to developments in the Australian housing market in recent years.

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An approach to taxation that goes beyond an emphasis on tax rates to consider such aspects as administration, compliance, and remittance. Despite its theoretical elegance, the standard optimal tax model has significant limitations. In this book, Joel Slemrod and Christian Gillitzer argue that tax analysis must move beyond the emphasis on optimal tax rates and bases to consider such aspects of taxation as administration, compliance, and remittance. Slemrod and Gillitzer explore what they term a tax-systems approach, which takes tax evasion seriously; revisits the issue of remittance, or who writes the check to cover tax liability (employer or employee, retailer or consumer); incorporates administrative and compliance costs; recognizes a range of behavioral responses to tax rates; considers nonstandard instruments, including tax base breadth and enforcement effort; and acknowledges that tighter enforcement is sometimes a more socially desirable way to raise revenue than an increase in statutory tax rates. Policy makers, Slemrod and Gillitzer argue, would be well advised to recognize the interrelationship of tax rates, bases, enforcement, and administration, and acknowledge that tax policy is really tax-systems policy.

The tax-systems perspective considers a variety of costs and behavioral margins often ignored in standard tax analysis: administrative and compliance costs, evasion and avoidance behavior, and multiple non-rate tax-system instruments (e.g., withholding and public disclosure). We show how the standard optimal tax framework can be augmented to include these new sources of cost and behavioral response by considering some enduring tax policy questions: What is the optimal commodity tax base breadth? How does enforcement effort targeted to avoidance behavior affect optimal progressivity? What fraction of returns should be audited? Should small firms be excluded from a tax system? * This article is an edited extract from the forthcoming book Tax Systems by Joel Slemrod and Christian Gillitzer, published by The MIT Press in 2014. Joel Slemrod delivered the Richard Musgrave Lecture 2013, in Munich on April 11, based on this material.