We derive median-voter results and study the shape of redistributional taxes when voters elect a candidate who imposes taxes to maximize own utility. Under general conditions, a median-productivity candidate is a Condorcet winner. The imposed tax function is nonlinear, may place high marginal...

It is known that when people generate externalities, a birth also generates an externality and efficiency requires a Pigou tax/subsidy on having children. The size of the externality from a birth is important for studying policy. We calculate the size of this "population externality" in a...

We calculate the harm a birth imposes on others when greenhouse gas emissions are a problem and a cap limits emissions damage. This negative population externality, which equals the corrective Pigovian tax on having a child, is substantial in calibrations. In our base case, the Pigovian tax is...

A cap on greenhouse gas emissions makes total emissions a fixed common-property resource. Population increases under a cap are therefore self-limiting: a population increase raises labor and reduces emissions per unit of labor, which lowers incomes and fertility. Because a marginal birth under a...

In most economies, investment is subsidized while capital is taxed. This is difficult to explain in a traditional perfect-foresight, representative-agent setting in which a single government sets all current and future taxes on capital. The authors consider a sequential-game setting in which tax...

We study economic natural selection in classical oligopoly settings. When underlying pure strategies consist of a finite number of prices, convex monotonic dynamics always converge under a weak condition to the smallest price in the support of the initial state that exceeds marginal cost. When...

We examine equilibrium voting strategies for elections with interested politicians facing uncertainty about voter pReferences. If politicians' utilities are defined over the set of strategies that voters select (instead of being dependent only on the probability of winning an election),...

Marginal effective tax rates on investment that are derived from the user cost of capital are nowadays widely used practically to assess the effects of capital taxation. In this paper, we examine several troublesome issues in the construction and use of marginal effective tax rates and user...