The incidence and efficiency losses of taxes have usually been analyzed in isolation from public expenditures. This negligence of the expenditure side may imply a serious misperception of the effects of marginal tax rates. The reason is that part of the marginal tax may in fact be a payment for...

This paper addresses transboundary environmental problems in the context of an optimal tax problem, when part of the labor force is mobile across countries. The policy instruments include both commodity taxation and nonlinear income taxation. We show how the tax policy in a noncooperative...

There is a rich literature analyzing the problems that will arise as the share of elderly and retired in the population increases in the near future. However, the locational decisions among the elderly as well as their implications in terms of taxes/transfers and of allocation of...

This paper concerns redistribution and provision of public goods in an economic federation with two levels of government: a local government in each locality and a central government for the economic federation as a whole. We assume that each locality is characterized by two ability-types (high...

This paper addresses transboundary environmental problems in the context of an optimal tax problem, when part of the labor force is mobile across countries. The policy instruments include both commodity taxation and nonlinear income taxation. We show how the tax policy in a noncooperative...

This paper concerns redistribution and public good provision in an economic federation with two levels of government: a local government in each locality and a (first mover) central government. Each locality is characterized by two ability-types, and the ability-distribution differs across...

Nonlinear income taxes and linear commodity taxes are analyzed when people differ with respect to ability, high-skill agents have heterogeneous preferences, and neither individual abilities nor preferences are observable. We characterize pure income tax optima, which may be bunching or...

This paper addresses optimal taxation, when therelationship between the consumption of a`dirty' good and the resulting environmentaldamage is uncertain and treated as a randomvariable by policy makers. The main purpose isto analyze how increased uncertainty, measuredas a mean preserving increase...

Paternalism, merit goods and specific egalitarianism are concepts we sometimes meet in the literature. The thing in common is that the policy maker does not fully respect the consumer sovereignty principle and designs policies according to some other criterion than individuals’ preferences....