A standard result in the optimal taxation literature is that, when agents differ in market ability and the government aims at redistributing from high- to low-skilled agents by means of an optimal nonlinear labor income tax and a set of commodity taxes, an optimally designed commodity tax...

Using an OLG model with skill uncertainty and private savings, we investigate whether an optimally designed set of public pension transfers can usefully supplement a nonlinear labor income tax as a welfare-enhancing policy instrument. We consider a Mirrleesian setting where agents' skills are...

In this paper we examine the desirability of subsidizing child care expenditures in a model where parents can choose both the quantity and the quality of child care services they purchase in the market. Our vehicle of analysis is a Mirrleesian optimal tax framework where child care services not...

When a public good is excludable it is possible to charge individuals for using the good. We study the role of prices on excludable public goods within an extension of the Stern-Stiglitz version of the Mirrlees optimal income tax model. Our discussion includes both the case where the public good...

The basic idea in this paper is that labor supply can be viewed as a function of the entire budget set, so that one way to account non-parametrically for a nonlinear budget set is to estimate a nonparametric regression where the variable in the regression is the budget set. In the special case...