We study optimal tax and educational policies in a dynamic private information economy, in which ex-ante heterogeneous individuals make an educational investment early in their life and face a stochastic wage distribution. We characterize labor and education wedges in this setting analytically...

Economic thought on climate policy as an instance of environmental regulation is strongly influenced by the principle of a uniform carbon price. Economists acknowledge that this principle breaks down in a second-best world with other distortions, such as taxes and market power in domestic and...

I study the optimal taxation of robots and labor income. In the model, robots substitute for routine labor and complement non-routine labor. I show that while it is optimal to distort robot adoption, robots may be either taxed or subsidized. The robot tax exploits general-equilibrium effects to...

Wealthier households obtain higher returns on their investments than poorer ones. How should the tax system account for this return inequality? I study capital taxation in an economy in which return rates endogenously correlate with wealth. The leading example is a financial market, where the...

Public provision of private goods is examined within a self-selection framework where production depends on labour supply of different households and the level of public provision. It is shown that productivity and wage-structure effects can create a role for public provision, even if...

This paper examines the rationale for the different tax treatment of gasoline and diesel cars currently observed in Europe. First, we analyse possible justifications for a different tax treatment: pure tax revenue considerations, externality cons0iderations and constraints on the tax instruments...

We study Pareto optimal tax and education policies when human capital upon labor market entry is endogenous and individuals face wage uncertainty. Though optimal labor distortions are history-dependent, i.e. depend on income and education, simple policy instruments can yield the desired...

We study Pareto optimal tax and education policies when human capital upon labor market entry is endogenous and individuals face wage uncertainty. Though optimal labor distortions are history-dependent, i.e. depend on income and education, simple policy instruments can yield the desired...

In a Ramsey policy regime, heterogeneity in beliefs about the potential costs of climate change is shown to produce policy ambiguities that alter carbon prices and taxation. Three sources of ambiguity are considered: (i) the private sector is skeptical, with beliefs that are unknown to the...

This paper employs analytical and numerical general equilibrium models to examine the optimal setting of environmental taxes in the presence of pre-existing distortionary taxes. Both models indicate, contrary to what several analysts have suggested, that the optimal environmental tax rate in...