This article asks whether household heterogeneity and market incompleteness have quantitatively important implications for the welfare effects of tax changes. We compare a representative-agent economy to an economy in which households face idiosyncratic uninsurable income risk. The income...

This article studies the properties of optimal fiscal policy in a stochastic growth model when the government cannot commit itself beyond the next period's capital income tax rate. We find that the results contrast markedly with those under full commitment. First, capital income tax rates are...