This paper examines the empirical relationship between the quality of the Indian judiciary and the economic development of the Indian States and Union Territories. It evaluates this causality by analysing the development of the state-level per capita income and poverty rates. I define the...

This paper examines the political economy of redistribution when voters have asymmetric information about the redistributive preferences of politicians and the latter cannot make credible policy commitments. The candidates in each party are endogenously selected by a process of Nash Bargaining...

As tradeable permit programmes mature, two inter-related issues are becoming more critical in creating viable responses to a long-term, highly uncertain environmental problem such as climate change. First, we need to update policies in response to new information; and second, we need to design...

The large wealth and consumption inequality in the U.S. is usually attributed to two market frictions: debt constraints and incomplete markets. Recent literature has argued that debt constraints are the critical friction while market incompleteness plays only a secondary role. We evaluate the...

Using an urban land use model in which jobs and residences are spatially dispersed and mixed, we treat the general equilibrium of land, labor and product markets and the trade-off between labor supply, commuting and discretionary travel. We show that the decentralization of population and of...

The purpose of this paper is to provide reasonable estimates for the welfare cost of environmental tax reform in the U.S. economy. Unlike most previous studies that empirically evaluate the deadweight cost of taxation, the model employed here considers explicitly the joint allocation of leisure...

New Zealand is unusual in that nearly 60% of local services are funded from property taxes. These are a mixture of land taxes, capital value taxes, annual rental value taxes and uniform general charges. We explore the efficiency and equity of this system at both national and local levels. We...

This paper is intended as a step toward the development of theoretically founded and operational environmental taxation formula in a second-best world. Recent studies find that environmental taxes typically exacerbate pre-existing tax distortions and, therefore, the optimal pollution tax should...

I propose the replacement of our current system of individual and corporate income, sales, excise, capital gains, import and export duties, gift and estate taxes with a single comprehensive “revenue neutral” Automated Payment Transaction (APT) tax. The APT tax consists of a flat rate tax...

This paper provides a model of nonlinear income taxation in a context of international mobility. We consider two identical countries, in which each government chooses non-cooperatively redistributive taxes. It is shown that when skilled workers can move at low cost, the income taxation does not...