The paper studies the role of income taxes and admission fees in financing excludable and nonexcludable public goods in a large economy. A renegotiation proofness condition makes the multidimensional Bayesian mechanism design problem tractable. Resulting formulae for optimal income taxes and...

This paper studies dynamic non-linear taxation in a two-period model without government commitment and a continuum of agents with privately known skill parameters, which are constant overtime. The government is utilitarian but cannot commit at t=1 to the tax scheme that she will propose at t=2....

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...

This paper characterizes the dynamics of Pareto efficient income taxes in a dynamic economy with human capital accumulation. I extend the tools and insights developed by Mirrlees (1971) into a dynamic framework. I follow Diamond (1998) by assuming that there are no income effects on labor...

We study a simple model of production, accumulation, and redistribution, where agents are heterogeneous in their initial wealth, and a sequence of redistributive tax rates is voted upon. Though the policy is infinite-dimensional, we prove that a median voter theorem holds if households have...

The purpose of this paper is to determine the normative and positive implications for fiscal policy in a weakly institutionalized economy which is not managed by a benevolent government, but is managed by a selfish dictator. We examine an economy with no capital, with fully state contingent...

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...