While examining the macroeconomic effects of increased government control of the informal sector, this paper develops a two-sector general equilibrium model featuring matching frictions, and heterogeneous workers in terms of moral. This facilitates an analysis of how wage setting and...

This is a theoretical study of human-capital accumulation, where parental, as well as public investments are essential. Policy influence rich and poor parents differently when they make educational decisions. Rich parents allocate resources efficiently between physical bequests and educational...

Micro simulation involves modeling the behavior of individuals and other decision units taking into account the effects of policy parameters such as tax rates, eligibility rules for benefits and subsidies and compensation rates in the social security system. The model is simulated to analyze the...

We impose a horizontal equity restriction on the problem of finding the optimal utilitarian tax mix. The horizontal equity constraint requires that individuals with the same ability have to pay the same amount of taxes regardless of their preferences for leisure. Contrary to normal findings, we...

When a public good is excludable it is possible to charge individuals for using the good. We study the role of prices on excludable public goods within an extension of the Stern-Stiglitz version of the Mirrlees optimal income tax model. Our discussion includes both the case where the public good...

This paper provides a brief survey of the bootstrap and its use in econometrics. As an introduction, the paper gives a description of the basics of the method, with a special emphasis on boostrap testing. A fairly large amount of space is devoted to discuss why bootstrap tests provide...

Conventional models of equilibrium unemployment typically imply that proportional taxes on labor earnings are neutral with respect to unemployment as long as the tax does not affect the replacement rate provided by unemployment insurance, i.e., unemployment benefits relative to after-tax...

Within the framework of the common value model, we examine the magnitude of the difference in expected outcome between first-price and second-price sealed bid auctions. The study is limited to two empirical specifications of bidders' signals: Weibull and normal distribution. The optimal bid...

The paper extends the basic Stiglitz (1982) model of optimal income taxation into general search equilibrium. When we extend the basic taxation model to include a more realistic treatment of the labor market, a number of new interesting mechanisms arise. When wages are fixed we find that a work...