With increased Internet usage in the EU, U.S. retailers have intensified their marketing efforts to reach these consumers. A major challenge for retailers selling online is that they must comply with the laws where the consumers reside. Past studies suggest that U.S. firms are not in full...

Optimal tax policies in dynamic models have unappealing features. In particular, optimal tax reform typically involves a large initial accumulation of government assets which is responsible for a large part of the welfare gains from optimal tax reform. In this paper, we investigate the...

In this paper, we document some features of the distribution of income, consumption and wealth in Canada using survey data from many different sources. We find that wage and income inequality has increased substantially over the last 30 years, but that much of this rise was offset by the tax and...

even greater extent than what tax deductibility implies.

In this paper we quantitatively investigate the implications of a model of consumption risk sharing where infinitely-lived households are subject to exogenous idiosyncratic shocks to their earnings, and where the realization of these shocks are private information. Our theoretical contribution...

In this paper, we study consumption risk sharing when individual income shocks are persistent and not publicly observable, and individuals can default on contracts at the price of financial autarky. We find that, in contrast to a model where the only friction is limited enforcement, our model...

In this paper we study how a benevolent government that cannot commit to future policy should trade off the costs and benefits of public expenditure. We characterize and solve for Markov-perfect equilibria of the dynamic game between successive governments. The characterization consists of an...

In this paper we explore the implications of tax competition between two jurisdictions in a neoclassical growth model under the assumption of perfect capital mobility. The government of each jurisdiction solves an optimal taxation problem under commitment, treating the other government's...

Several approaches to finding the second-order approximation to a dynamic model have been proposed recently. This paper differs from the existing literature in that it makes use of the Magnus and Neudecker (1999) definition of the Hessian matrix. The key result is a linear system of equations...