In this paper, a new method is forwarded of estimating the effect of short-run macroeconomic fluctuations on concentration in the size distribution of personal income. In particular, the impacts of changes in unemployment and participation rates and in the level of wage and salary income upon...

We study the optimal redistributive tax structure when the population can be disaggregated into tagged groups. We begin with the case in which the tag has no normative significance, but simply separates the population into identifiable groups with different distributions of ability-types. Under...

This paper studies multi-stage processes of non-cooperative voluntary provision of public goods. In the first stage, one or more players announce contributions that may be conditional on the subsequent contributions of others. In later stages, players choose their own contributions and fulfill...

In this paper, we characterize a mechanism for reducing pollution emissions in which countries, acting non-cooperatively, commit to match each others' abatement levels and may subsequently engage in emissions quota trading. The analysis shows that the mechanism leads to efficient outcomes. The...

The importance and complexity of petroleum and hard minerals operations is matched by the importance and complexity of finding effective ways to tax them. Many of these challenges arise in other activities too (exhaustibility of deposits being the main exception), but they take such extreme form...

Using the Mirrlees optimal income tax model with a maxi-min social welfare function, we derive conditions for a decreasing marginal tax rate throughout the skill distribution, a strictly concave tax function in income and a single-peaked average tax schedule. With additive preferences and a...

Until fairly recently, the Pigovian position that activities generating unpriced external economies would be undersupplied was universally accepted. It rested on the simple assertion that marginal social benefits exceeded marginal private benefits of the activity, and that, by equating the...

Politicians typically do not know what policies are best for achieving their broad objectives, so rely on bureaucrats for advice. Bureaucrats are better informed, so can manipulate outcomes by proposing policies that suit their interests. We capture this conflict of interests using a model of...

The Canadian system of equalization is designed to address differences in revenue-raising capacity across provinces, basing a province's entitlements on its actual tax bases. However, since it does so on a year-on-year basis, the standard against which a given province's equalization...