We study the efficiency of credit market equilibria when financial intermediaries cannot observe the riskiness or the returns of potential investment projects. With loan financing, there is over-investment in high-return, high-risk projects and under-investment in low-return, low-risk projects...

This paper studies multi-stage processes of non-cooperative voluntary provision of public goods. In the first stage, one or more players announce contributions that may be conditional on the subsequent contributions of others. In later stages, players choose their own contributions and fulfill...

This paper studies the optimal commodity taxation problem when time taken in consumption is a perfect substitute for either labor or leisure. It shows that while labor substitutability affects the optimal tax structure, leisure substitutability leaves the classical optimal tax results intact. In...

Entrepreneurs starting new firms face two sorts of asymmetric information problems. Information about the quality of new investments may be private, leading to adverse selection in credit markets. And, entrepreneurs may not observe the quality of workers applying for jobs, resulting in adverse...

Politicians typically do not know what policies are best for achieving their broad objectives, so rely on bureaucrats for advice. Bureaucrats are better informed, so can manipulate outcomes by proposing policies that suit their interests. We capture this conflict of interests using a model of...

We study the optimal redistributive tax structure when the population can be disaggregated into tagged groups. We begin with the case in which the tag has no normative significance, but simply separates the population into identifiable groups with different distributions of ability-types. Under...

This paper examines how sequential decision-making by two levels of government can result in vertical fiscal imbalances (VFI). Federal-regional transfers serve to equalize the marginal cost of public funds between regions hit by different shocks. The optimal vertical fiscal gap minimizes the...

Using the Mirrlees optimal income tax model with a maxi-min social welfare function, we derive conditions for a decreasing marginal tax rate throughout the skill distribution, a strictly concave tax function in income and a single-peaked average tax schedule. With additive preferences and a...

We study optimal income and commodity tax policy with credit-constrained low-income households. Workers are assumed to receive an even ow of income during the tax year, but make tax payments or receive transfers at the end of the year. They use their disposable income to purchase multiple...