Several frictions restrict the government s ability to tax assets. First of all, it is very costly to monitor trades on international asset markets. Moreover, agents can resort to non-observable low-return assets such as cash, gold or foreign currencies if taxes on observable assets become too...

We characterize optimal income taxation and unemployment insurance in a search-matching framework where both voluntary and involuntary unemployment are endogenous and Nash bargaining determines wages. Individuals differ in utility when voluntarily unemployed (non-participants in the labour...

We examine how allowing individuals to emigrate to pay lower taxes changes the optimal nonlinear income tax scheme in a Mirrleesian economy. An individual emigrates if his domestic utility is less than his utility abroad, net of migration costs – utilities and costs both depending on...

Simula and Trannoy (2007) have shown that ELIE is confronted with implementation issues when the policymaker cannot observe the time worked by every individual. This paper tries to fix this problem. To this aim, it characterizes the second-best allocations which are the closest to ELIE (i) in...

We derive testable conditions ensuring that the income tax is optimal when agents are ex-ante identical but face idiosyncratic income risk. The optimal tax depends positively on both absolute risk aversion and risk variance and negatively on labor supply elasticity and absolute prudence. The...

This paper characterizes optimal non-linear income taxation in an economy with a continuum of unobservable productivity levels and endogenous involuntary unemployment due to frictions in the labor markets. Redistributive taxation distorts labor demand and wages. Compared to the laissez-faire,...

This paper shows how the optimal level of Pigouvian taxation is influenced by distributive concerns. With second-best instruments, a higher level of income redistribution calls for a lower level of Pigouvian taxation. More redistributionimplies that tax collection via the income tax creates...

We wish to study optimal dynamic nonlinear income taxes. Do real world taxes share some of their features? What policy prescriptions can be made? We study a two period model, where the consumers and government each have separate budget constraints in the two periods, so income cannot be...

We wish to study optimal dynamic nonlinear income taxes. Do real world taxes share some of their features? What policy prescriptions can be made? We study a two period model, where the consumers and government each have separate budget constraints in the two periods, so income cannot be...

The paper provides a new formulation of the Mirrlees-Seade theo- rem on the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, under weaker assumptions and in a more general model. The formulation of the the- orem is independent of whether the model involves finitely many types or a continuous type...