Heterogeneity between unemployed and employed individuals matters for optimal fiscal policy. This paper considers the consequences of such heterogeneity for the determination of optimal capital and income taxes in a model with matching frictions in the labor market. In line with a recent finding...

We explore a political-economy model of labor subsidies, extending Meltzer and Richard's median-voter model to a dynamic setting. We explore only one source of heterogeneity: initial wealth. As a consequence, given an operative wealth effect, poorer agents work harder, and if the agent with...

Heterogeneity between unemployed and employed individuals matters for optimal fiscal policy. This paper considers the consequences of welfare heterogeneity between these two groups for the determination of optimal capital and labor income taxes in a model with matching frictions in the labor...

We study the structure of optimal wedges and wealth taxes in a Mirrleesian economy with endogenous skills. Human capital is a private state variable that drives the skill process of each individual. Building on the findings of the labor literature, we assume that human capital investment is a)...

Following the seminal work of Mirrlees (REStud, 1971), there has been a large amount of work on how to design an optimal tax system when agents' skills are private information. This literature makes a strong assumption: it assumes that the data generation process for skills in the economy is...

Two results characterize previous studies of optimal capital income taxation: (i) In order to avoid distorting capital accumulation incentives the ex ante capital tax rate should be set to zero in the long run and ii) by varying the ex post capital tax rate governments may be able to insulate...

This paper describes the behavior of tax policies under incomplete financial markets. The government finances a stochastic stream of expenditures by collecting the capital income and the labor income taxes, and issuing a one-period bond which pays state-contingent returns. We show that putting...

In this paper we argue that it might not be such a bad idea to tax capital income in the long run. We address this question in an environment in which individuals are finitely lived and face uninsurable idiosyncratic labor income risk. In choosing a tax system a benevolent planner trades off...