This paper considers the practical problem of distributing a fixed budget for poverty alleviation to a population whose poverty status is not directly observable. Some information on the relationship between poverty status and a number of observable and verifiable characteristics is assumed to...

This paper considers the practical problem of distributing a fixed budget for poverty alleviation to a population whose poverty status is not directly observable. Some information on the relationship between poverty status and a number of observable and verifiable characteristics is assumed to...

A windfall of natural resource revenue (or foreign aid) faces government with choices of how to manage public debt, investment, and the distribution of funds for consumption, particularly if the windfall is both anticipated and temporary.  Standard policy advice follows the permanent income...

This paper shows how to derive a complete set of optimality conditions characterising the solution to a dynamic optimal income tax problem in the spirit of Mirrlees (1971), under the assumption that a 'first-order' approach to incentive compatibility is valid.  The method relies on constructing...

Climate change must deal with two market failures, global warming and learning by doing in renewable use. The social optimum requires an aggressive renewables subsidy in the near term and a gradually rising carbon tax which falls in long run. As a result, more renewables are used relative to...

What kind of tariff reform is likely to raise welfare in situations where tariff revenue is important?  Uncertainty about specification and risk from imprecise parameter estimates of any particular specification reduce the credibility of simulation estimates.  A promising alternative is to...

Demand for oil is very price inelastic.  Facing such demand, an extractive cartell induces the highest price that does not destroy its demand, unlike the conventional Hotelling analysis: the cartel tolerates ordinary substitutes to its oil but deters high-potential ones.  Limit-pricing...

This paper develops a formula for the optimal nonlinear income tax, the terms of which are familiar from the theory of linear income taxation. The development uses the idea of a perturbation of the optimal schedule and is based upon as assumption of differentiability. It is also shown that the...

The regulator of a natural monopoly that sets a two-part tariff and whose marginal cost is stochastic will generally want the price to vary less than marginal cost when the lump-sum charge in the tariff is fixed. A trade-off exists between efficient pricing and an optimal allocation of risk....

Probably the most enduring result in the theory of optimum income taxation is that, for a sufficiently thin upper tail to the skill distribution, the marginal tax rate should fall rather than rise with income. This paper shows that this result is highly sensitive to a very strong informational...