We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justification forcapital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought tobe taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to benonlinear functions of income and consumption and find that, when ability...

We develop a theory of endogenous and stochastic fluctuations in economic activity. Individual firms choose to randomize over firing or keeping workers who performed poorly in the past to give them an ex-ante incentive to exert effort. Different firms choose to correlate the outcome of their...