We present a static model of aggregate demand and unemployment. The economy has a nonproduced good, a produced good, and labor. Product and labor markets have matching frictions. A general equilibrium is a set of prices, market tightnesses, and quantities such that buyers and sellers optimize...

This paper develops a realistic, tractable normative theory of socially-optimal capital taxation. We present a dynamic model of savings and bequests with heterogeneous random tastes for bequests to children and for wealth per se. We derive formulas for optimal tax rates on capitalized...

This paper combines income tax returns with Flow of Funds data to estimate the distribution of household wealth in the United States since 1913. We estimate wealth by capitalizing the incomes reported by individual taxpayers, accounting for assets that do not generate taxable income. We...

This paper derives optimal inheritance tax formulas that (a) capture the key equity-efficiency trade-off, (b) are expressed in terms of estimable sucient statistics, (c) are robust to the underlying structure of preferences. We consider dynamic stochastic models with general and heterogeneous...

This paper analyzes the effects of income taxation on the international migration and earnings of top earners using a Danish preferential foreigner tax scheme and population-wide Danish administrative data. This scheme, introduced in 1991, allows new immigrants with high earnings to be taxed at...

This paper analyzes the effects of information about inequality and taxes on preferences for redistribution using randomized online surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk). About 5,000 respondents were randomized into treatments providing interactive information on U.S. income inequality, the...

This paper analyzes optimal unemployment insurance (UI) over the business cycle. We consider a general matching model of the labor market. For a given UI, the economy is efficient if tightness satisfies a generalized Hosios condition, slack if tightness is too low, and tight if tightness is too...

This paper proposes a new way to evaluate tax reforms, by aggregating losses and gains of different individuals using "generalized social marginal welfare weights." A tax system is optimal if no budget neutral small reform can increase the weighted sum of (money metric) gains and losses across...

We analyze randomized online survey experiments providing interactive, customized information on US income inequality, the link between top income tax rates and economic growth, and the estate tax. The treatment has large effects on views about inequality but only slightly moves tax and transfer...

This paper analyzes optimal unemployment insurance (UI) over the business cycle. We consider a general matching model of the labor market. For a given UI, the economy is efficient if tightness satisfies a generalized Hosios condition, slack if tightness is too low, and tight if tightness is too...