We analyze the implications of the decline in labor’s share in national income for optimal Ramsey taxation. It is optimal to accompany the decline in labor share by raising capital taxes only if the labor share is falling because of a decline in competition or other mechanisms that raise the...

We study the aggregate and distributional consequences of replacing corporate profit taxes with shareholder taxes, namely taxes on dividends and capital gains, in a setting with incomplete markets and heterogeneity at both the household and the firm level. The reform yields distributional gains...

In this paper, we aim to contribute to the growth literature by presenting evidence that the presence of an informal sector might significantly affect both the level as well as the course of the total factor productivity (TFP). To this end, we develop a framework where we can compare the TFP in...

In this paper, we investigate the evolution of the informal sector through structural transformation. We develop both a three-sector and a five-sector dynamic general equilibrium (DGE) model, which can simultaneously account for structural transformation between agriculture, industry and...

In the United States structure and equipment capital are e ffectively taxed at different rates. Recently, President Obama joined the group of policy makers and economists who propose to eliminate these di erentials. This paper analyzes the consequences of such a reform using an incomplete...

The U.S. wage and earnings distributions display significantly higher levels of inequality today compared to the late 1960's. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we want to assess to what extent the observed changes in inequality can be explained by a model that incorporates the...

This paper provides two contributions to the study of intergenerational mobility. First, we render a thorough characterization of education mobility in Turkey at the national level, including a three-generation mobility analysis. We find that the education mobility is significantly lower in...

This paper studies optimal taxation of bequests in a model where altruistic parents and their offspring disagree on the offspring's labor supply decision. I show that whenever offspring is too lazy from the parent's perspective and there are income effects on labor supply, optimal policy...

This paper studies optimal distribution of skills in an optimal income tax framework with convex skill constraints. The problem is cast as a social planning problem where a redistributive planner chooses how to distribute a given amount of aggregate skills across people. We find that optimal...

The skill premium has increased significantly in the United States in the last five decades. During the same period, individual wage risk has also increased. This paper proposes a mechanism through which a rise in wage risk increases the skill premium. Intuitively, a rise in uninsured wage risk...