A recent wave of literature, partly motivated by presidential campaign tax reform plans, analyzes tax expenditure limitation proposals. These reforms are often advanced not only, or even primarily, because they reduce distortions caused by favoritism for some types of expenditures over others....

Does significant market power or the presence of large rents affect optimal income taxation, calling for greater redistribution due to tainted gains? Or perhaps less because of an additional wedge that distorts labor effort? Do concerns about inequality have implications for antitrust,...

Anti-utilitarian norms often are used in assessing tax systems. Two motivations support this practice. First, many believe utilitarianism to be insufficiently egalitarian. Second, utilitarianism does not give independent weight to other equitable principles, notably concerns that reforms may...

A large body of literature is devoted to the measurement of income inequality, yet little attention is given to the question, Why measure inequality? However, the reasons for measurement bear importantly on whether and how measurement should be done. Upon examination, normative measures are...

Self-reporting -- the reporting by parties of their own behavior to an enforcement authority -- is a commonly observed aspect of law enforcement, as in the context of environmental and safety regulation. We add self-reporting to the model of the control of harmful externalities through...

An important result due to Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) is that differential commodity taxation is not optimal in the presence of an optimal nonlinear income tax (given weak separability of utility between labor and all consumption goods). This article demonstrates that their conclusion holds...

Alan Auerbach and Kevin Hassett offer a new measure of horizontal equity (HE) that is designed to overcome deficiencies in prior indexes. There is, however, a fundamental problem that their effort shares with their predecessors' attempts: the underlying rationale for pursuing HE at the expense...

This article addresses conceptual issues concerning the distributive incidence of public goods. Solutions depend on the specific purposes for asking the question of distributive incidence notably, assessing the extent to which various public goods should be provided, determining how the...

The public at large, many policymakers, and some economists hold views of social welfare that attach some importance to factors other than individuals' utilities. This note shows that any such non-individualistic notion of social welfare conflicts with the Pareto principle

We examine how moral sanctions and rewards, notably the moral sentiments involving feelings of guilt and virtue, would be employed to govern individuals' behavior if the objective were to maximize social welfare. In our model, we analyze how the optimal use of guilt and virtue is influenced by...