There is a large empirical literature on policy measures targeted at children but surprisingly very little theoretical foundation to ground the debate on the optimality of the different instruments. In the present paper, we examine the merit of targeting children through two general policies,...

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

Drawing from the formal setting of the optimal tax theory (Mirrlees 1971), the paper identifies the level of Rawlsianism of some European social planner starting from the observation of the real data and redistribution systems and uses it to build a metric that allows measuring the degree of...

We study the implications of limited commitment on education and tax policies chosen by benevolent governments. Individual wages are determined by both innate abilities and education levels. Consistent with real world practices, the government can decide to subsidize different levels of...

This paper analyzes Pareto optimal taxation of labor and capital income in a lifecycle framework with private information and idiosyncratic risk. We focus on historyindependent tax systems. We thereby complement the Mirrlees taxation literature, which has so far typically either characterized...

Using a collective model of consumption, we characterize optimal commodity taxes aimed at targeting specific individuals within the household. The main message is that distortionary indirect taxation can circumvent the agency problem of the household. Essentially, taxation should discourage less...

Social marginal welfare weights play an important role in areas of applied public policy analysis such as tax reform. These weights reflect the values of the social planner, or equivalently the underlying social welfare function. A number of recent papers have questioned the "default"...