This paper analyses a growth model wherein saving results from bequest-as-consumption. It first looks at the market equilibrium and at the optimal solution. Then it turns to the issue of decentralizing the optimal solution with various taxes and transfers. Depending on the available instruments,...

This paper considers a government that seeks both to redistribute income and to encourage or discourage the consumption of a certain good. This good is assumed to be either a merit or demerit good. Individuals differ in their exogenous income and in their preferences for the merit good. The...

Redistributive taxation under uncertainty has two functions: not only the redisribution of income across individuals who are ex-ante different but also the sharing of risk between them. The economic integration of factor markets changes the distribution of income within each country, and so the...

This paper examines the properties of the optimal nonlinear income tax when preferences are quasilinear in leisure and heterogeneous. Individuals differ in their ability and in their preferences for leisure. The government seeks to redistribute income. It can perfectly observe the level of...

We introduce a simple measure of risk aversion in the large. Besides satisfying properties which are conceptually analogous to the usual properties of the Arrow-Pratt measure, the index of risk aversion in the large leads to a stronger concept of decreasing risk aversion, which necessarily imp...

This paper studies the optimal direct/indirect tax mix in a setting where individuals differ in several unobservable characteristics (productivity and endowments). Tax instruments (income and commodity taxes) are constrained solely by the information structure.

Much attention has been given to the impact of fiscal competition on the level of public expenditure, but relatively little to the impact on its composition. Using a broadly familiar and reasonably rich model of fiscal competition in the presence of mobile capital, this paper establishes a...

In a model where agents have unequal production skills and different preferences, we build social welfare functions which rely only on ordinal non-comparable information on individual preferences. Social welfare functions are required to satisfy properties of compensation for inequalities in...

This paper dels with optimal taxation in a two-class economy with two private commodities and labour. We derive optimal non-linear income and linear commodity taxes in the presence of merit goods. We formulate merit goods arguments via pathology of individual choice. We assume weak separability...

This paper constructs a general equilibrium model with monopolistically competitive firms and endogenous markups where government spending consists of both consumption and investment goods.