The paper shows how commodity taxes can provide insurance to consumers when the producer price is volatile. Specific and ad valorem taxes have differing roles. The optimal specific tax is positive when demand has some elasticity. The optimal ad valorem rate is zero when demand is unit-elastic,...

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 shouldfall rather than rise with income. This paper shows that this result is highly sensitiveto a very strong informational...

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...

Carbon leakage is a major concern for policymakers involved with environmentalinitiatives such as the European Unions emissions trading scheme and similar cap-and-trade proposals in the United States, Australia, and elsewhere. This paperprovides a framework for understanding the drivers...

This paper examines the amount of grandfathering needed for an emissionstrading scheme (ETS) to have a neutral impact on firm profits. Weprovide a simple formula to calculate profit-neutral grandfathering in aCournot model with firms of different sizes and a general demand function.Using this...

Proposals are often made to tax goods which are environmentally damaging. Manysuch goods are consumed both directly by households and industry at large: for example,carbon-intensive fuel, waste water or congested road space. This paper adopts a tax-reformsetting to evaluate such a policy. The...

Trade unions have been successful in compressing the wage distributionbut not in influencing the share of national income going to labour. This paperclaims that a compressed wage distribution provides insurance in the same way thatthe tax and benefit system does and thus may be...

We introduce a model of redistributive income taxation and public expenditure. Thisjoint treatment permits analyzing the interdependencies between the two policies: onecannot be chosen independently of the other. Empirical evidence reveals that partisanconfrontation essentially falls on...

This paper examines the impact of a major change in dividend taxation introduced in the UK in July1997. The reform was structured in such a way that the immediate impact fell almost entirely on thelargest investor class in the UK, namely pension funds. We analyse the behaviour of share...