Rochet (1989) showed that with distortionary income taxes, social insurance is a desirable redistributive device when risk and ability are negatively correlated. This finding is reexamined when ex post moral hazard and adverse selection are included, and under different informational...

The idea of a wealth tax has taken on new prominence since French economist Thomas Piketty famously proposed a global wealth tax in 2013; Senator Elizabeth Warren has even made a national wealth tax a plank in her campaign to become the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. The current interest...

This paper addresses the question of the optimal taxation of labour and interest income in an overlapping generations model with two unobservable characteristics, ability and inheritance. We assume realistically that saving can only be taxed anonymously, whereas the tax on labour earnings can be...

Tax and expenditure policies are studied in a federation with imperfectly mobile households. States implement a linear progressive tax and supply a public good. A vertical fiscal externality, reflecting the effect of the state policies on federal revenues, provides an incentive to state taxes...