People are heterogenous in the skills by which they turn eort into output. A central question in normative public economics is how to redistribute resources from more- to less-skilled individuals eciently. In addition to income taxation, this paper considers another policy tool of redistribution...

This paper studies efficient allocation of resources in an economy in which agents are initially heterogeneous with regard to their wealth levels and whether they have ideas or not. An agent with an idea can start a business that generates random returns. Agents have private information about...

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...

This paper studies efficient allocation of resources in an economy in which potential entrepreneurs are heterogeneous initially regarding their wealth levels and whether they have ideas or not. An agent with an idea can start a business which generates random returns. I assume agents have...

We study optimal bequest and capital taxation over the life-cycle in an OLG model. In this environment, we show that the efficient allocation can be implemented via age-dependent linear taxes/subsidies on capital income and bequests. First, as long as the degree of self-control problem is weakly...

The effective marginal tax rates on returns to capital assets show considerable amount of variation depending on the asset type in the U.S. corporate tax code. For instance, the effective marginal tax rate on the return to communications equipment is 19% whereas it is above 35% for...

The effective taxes on capital returns differ depending on capital type in the U.S. tax code. This paper uncovers a novel reason for the optimality of differential capital taxation. We set up a model with two types of capital – equipments and structures – and equipment-skill complementarity....

We study optimal taxation of savings in an economy where agents face self-control problems and are allowed to be partially naive. We assume that the severity of self-control problems changes over the life-cycle. We focus on quasihyperbolic discounting with constant elasticity of intertemporal...

This paper documents the variation in economic characteristics across voyages during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Dispersion in output, measured as slaves disembarked, is highest across Portuguese voyages, lower across French voyages, and lowest across British voyages. We use a structural...

We construct a structural model that allows us to jointly estimate the demand for smartphones and paid apps using a Bayesian approach. Our data comes from more than 500 college students in Hong Kong and Shanghai. We find that the moral cost rather than the monetary cost of jailbreaking...