In this paper, individuals, initially living in a Mirrleesian economy A, have outside options consisting in settling down in a laissez-faire country B while paying positive migration costs. We first examine the impact of the threat of migration, assuming participation constraints are taken into...

This paper examines how allowing individuals to emigrate to pay lower taxes changes the optimal non-linear income tax scheme in a Mirrleesian economy. Type-dependent participation constraints are borrowed from contract theory. An individual emigrates if his domestic utility is less than his...

This paper addresses the impact of violent conflict on social capital, as measured by citizen anticipation in community groups defined for four activity types: governance, social service, infrastructure development and risk-sharing. Combining household panel data from Indonesia with conflict...

The paper reports on experiments designed to compare the performance of two incentive mechanisms in public goods problems. One mechanism rewards and penalizes deviations from the average contribution of the other agents to the public good (tax-subsidy mechanism). Another mechanism allows agents...

A student’s future log-wage is given by the sum of a skill premium and a random personal “ability” term. Students observe only a private, noisy signal of their ability, and universities can condition admission decisions on the results of noisy tests. We assume first that universities are...

In a model where agents have unequal skills and heterogeneous preferences about consumption goods and leisure, this paper studies how to combine linear commodity taxes and non-linear income tax. It proposes a particular social welfare function on the basis of fairness principles. It then derives...

This paper characterizes the optimal redistributive taxation when individuals are heterogeneous in two exogenous dimensions: their skills and their values of non-market activities. Search-matching frictions on the labor markets create unemployment. Wages, labor demand and participation are...

This article discusses the properties of Kolm’s ELIE proposal in the Context of optimal income taxation “à la Mirrlees”. It first shows that ELIE gives rise to non-standard type-dependent budget sets, which has important implications in terms of a minimum labour requirement. Second, it...

Simula and Trannoy (2007) have shown that ELIE is confronted with implementation issues when the policymaker cannot observe the time worked by every individual. This paper tries to fix this problem. To this aim, it characterizes the second-best allocations which are the closest to ELIE (i) in...

Xu’s theorem comforts ranking the freedom of choice provided by budget sets as their volume in deriving it from three axioms. Yet, one and a half of these axioms can be discussed. In contrast, simple logic – it seems – leads one to order the freedom provided by budgets sets as the distance...