Monitoring the job-search activities of unemployed workers is a common government intervention. Typically, a caseworker reviews the unemployed worker's employment contacts at some frequency, and applies sanctions if certain requirements are not met. I model monitoring in the optimal unemployment...

This short paper shows the interdependence of taxation and monitoring policy in a search and matching model of equilibrium unemployment with an underground sector. More precisely, from a social welfare standpoint, two options are available to the policy maker: s/he may either substitute a...

Monitoring the job-search activities of unemployed workers is a common government intervention. I model monitoring in the optimal unemployment insurance framework of Hopenhayn and Nicolini (1997), where job-search effort is private information for the unemployed worker. In the model, monitoring...

During recessions, the U.S. government substantially increases the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits through multiple extensions. This paper seeks to understand the incentives driving these increases. Because of the trade-off between insurance and job search incentives, the...

In this paper we consider a model of optimal efficiency and agglomeration economies .Given the presence of urban and social externalities and in the absence of corrective policy, the efficiency wage chosen in decentralized market economy is too high. Indeed, in her optimal choice of wage and...

During recessions, the U.S. government substantially increases the duration of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits through multiple extensions. This paper seeks to understand the incentives driving these increases. Because of the trade-off between insurance and job search incentives, the...

We investigate the role of government commitment to future policies in shaping unemployment insurance (UI) policy in a stochastic general equilibrium model of labor search and matching. Compared with the optimal(Ramsey)policy of a government with commitment, the policy under no commitment...

The present paper examines, within a dynamic framework, the use of information provision as a policy instrument to supplement environmental taxation. We assume that at least a fraction of consumers do not posses the required information to make the optimal choices, and that their behavior at...

This paper begins with a survey of the literature on the political economy approaches to labor income taxation. We focus on recent progress made by examining in detail the specific properties of non-linear taxes derived in the context of voting. Next, we present new results on the existence of...

The literatures dealing with voting, optimal income taxation, implementation, and pure public goods are drawn on here to address the problem of voting over income taxes to finance a public good. In contrast with previous articles, general nonlinear income taxes that affect the labor-leisure...