A two-region economy consists of a given but different number of immobile workers in each region, and a given number of mobile firms. Firms create jobs where they locate, but there is frictional unemployment. Two sorts of agglomeration effects arise: those from economies of scale in matching,...

Redistribution programs are constrained because those not working may be either unable to work, voluntarily unemployed or involuntarily unemployed. The inability to distinguish among these three cases inhibits the targeting of transfers to those most in need. Enabling the government to monitor...

Public and private provision of a service coexist. There is asymmetric information between the government and the agency providing the public service with respect to the costs, the quality of the service and the innovation effort of the agency. We examine the optimal government design of the...

Properties of the optimal income tax for quasi-linear in leisure preferences are studied. With utilitarian or maxi-min objectives, closed-form solutions are obtained. Bunching occurs over intervals where the second-order incentive condition is binding. Whether this occurs depends solely on the...

Governments use expenditures extensively as redistributive devices. Examples include the public provision of health, education, welfare, and public pensions. The authors' purpose is to investigate the normative rationale for such policies. In particular, they study the role of government...

Using the Mirrlees optimal income tax model under maximin, we derive fairly mild conditions for a decreasing marginal tax rate throughout the skill distribution with no bunching, a strictly concave tax function in income and a single-peaked average tax schedule. Assuming additive preferences and...

This paper surveys the evolution of the use of the theory of second best in public economics. It argues that much of modern normative public economics can be interpreted as simply applied second-best analysis. The original theory of second best as expounded by Lipsey and Lancaster involved...

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-instrument in high-return, high-risk projects and under-investment in low-return, low-risk projects...