Indirect taxes contribute to a sizeable part of government revenues around the world. Typically there are few different tax rates, and the goods are partitioned into classes associated with each rate. The present paper studies how to group the goods in these few classes. We take as given the...

In a second best environment, the optimal policy choice sometimes follows first best rules. This paper presents a formal general argument which allows to unify much of the literature. It lays down the information structure and separability assumptions under which the results hold in a variety of...

We study how asymmetric information affects the set of rationalizable solutions in a linear setup where the outcome is determined by forecasts about this same outcome. The unique rational expectations equilibrium is also the unique rationalizable solution when the sensitivity of the outcome to...

This note characterizes the optimal base for commodity taxation in the presence of administrative fixed costs varying across goods. For low tax rates, the optimal base only comprises commodities whose discouragement index is greater than the ratio of their administrative costs to the tax they...

[eng] This article studies the effects of a reform that would replace value added tax (VAT), a levy chiefly assessed on final household consumption, with social contributions assessed on wages. We discuss the conditions in which such a measure is not neutral for the economy. We then offer an...