In an imperfectly competitive economy with direct and indirect taxes, the first best wage subsidy overcompensates workers and provides the incentive to misreport working hours. We show that in the second best optimum where the government cannot use a wage subsidy, the optimal policy is to tax...

In this paper we calibrate the social cost of optimal taxes in a class of imperfectly competitive economies and examine the correspondence of this social cost with the number of tax instruments and the number and the sources of distortions. We calibrate the Ramsey equilibrium for three standard...

Evidence of declining trend in OECD economies' income tax rates and the concern of enhancing competition in the US and the EU product markets subtly motivate the question if low income tax rates are optimal in an imperfectly competitive economy. This paper examines optimal income tax policy in a...

The nineties' agricultural reform in China that was aimed at deregulating the agricultural market eventually resulted in a huge drop in agricultural production and a high rate of inflation in agricultural prices; this apparently motivated the government to take over the control of agricultural...

We model banks as profit-cum-utility maximizing firms and study, inter alia, bankers' incentives (optim al effort) and incentive driven productivity following deregulations. Our model puts to test a panel of Nepalese commercial banks which went through deep financial reforms in the recent past....

Following the rural reform in 1978 a series of agricultural reforms were introduced in China. The main aim of these reforms was to create incentives for the farmers to produce more. The nineties' price reform that was aimed at deregulating the agricultural market eventually resulted in a huge...