This paper studies the effects on electoral competition of political parties relying on monetary donations and volunteer labour for their electioneering activities. It also examines whether a recorded decline in party activism increases special-interest influence on party policy platforms....

A fundamental issues in designing any fiscal regime for non-renewable resources is the balance between rent taxes and royalties. This paper reviews the core issues that arise, in terms of both efficient rent extraction and correcting various market failures. Issues of asymmetric information, for...

We study optimal nonlinear income taxation when earnings can differ because of both ability and luck, so the income tax has both a redistributive role and an insurance role. A substantial literature on optimal redistribution in the absence of uncertainty has evolved since Mirrlees’ original...

Atkinson and Stiglitz show that with weakly separability, differential commodity taxes are unnecessary given an optimal nonlinear income tax. Deaton showed that with an optimal linear progressive income tax, commodity taxes are superfluous under weakly separable and linear Engel curves. Using...

This paper surveys the various forms of market failure that can arise when innovating entrepreneurs consider entering an industry, and outlines possible implications for public policy. Externalities can arise from entrepreneurial activities such as spillover benefits from new innovations and...

Tax evasion is modeled as a risky activity and integrated into a standard problem of optimal tax design. It is shown that there is a trade off between reducing tax evasion and reducing tax distortion. Thus it is efficient to supplement a broad-based wage tax by a tax on specific consumption if...

This paper analyzes optimal linear commodity taxes joint with non-linear income taxes. We provide optimal tax rules based on empirically observable elasticities. We demonstrate that commodities should be taxed/subsidized if doing so boosts labor supply. The critical role of commodity taxation is...

Differences across decades in the counter-cyclical stance of fiscal policy can identify whether the growth in government spending affects output growth and so speeds recovery from a recession. We study government-spending reaction functions from the 1920s and 1930s for twenty countries. There...

This paper studies the effects on electoral competition of political parties relying on monetary donations and volunteer labour for their electioneering activities. It also examines whether a recorded decline in party activism increases special-interest influence on party policy platforms....

This essay examines the influence of a politician's party on her accountability to the electorate. It also considers what the conjectured waning of political parties may imply for the effectiveness of elections in disciplining politicians, and for voter welfare. The paper models the election...