We study optimal capital taxation in a limited commitment environment. Our environment consists of a continuum of households with idiosyncratic labor shocks, who have access to a complete contingent claims market. Financial contracts are not perfectly enforceable; as in Kehoe and Levine (1993),...

We study optimal capital taxation under limited commitment. We prove that the optimal tax rate on capital income should be positive in steady state and should be increasing over time provided that full risk-sharing is not feasible. In a limited commitment environment, a one unit increase of...

Governments have traditionally financed their activities by selling nominal debt of various maturities. A long standing question concerns the optimal management of these liabilities. Many contributors have posited a role for short term nominal debt, either on cost minimization grounds or on tax...