Elbert Dijkgraaf defended his PhD-thesis 'Regulating the Dutch Waste Market' on 5 November 2004. This thesis analyses whether the risen costs of waste collection and treatment can be diminished by changing policy instruments. The thesis shows that user fees are very effective in reducing the...

When a debtor goes bankrupt and limited assets have to be divided between competing creditors, should unpaid taxes owed to the government be paid before the debts owed to other creditors? This Article defends the notion that some tax debts should be awarded priority. Insofar as bankruptcy...

The U.S. economy is growing more slowly than it can and should be growing because it does not invest enough in infrastructure, science, and education. There is an important procedural obstacle to funding public investments — a process of scoring the economic effect of legislation. This process...

We consider abstract social systems of private property, made of n individuals endowed with non-paternalistic interdependent preferences, who interact through exchanges on competitive markets and Pareto-efficient lumpsum transfers. The transfers follow from a distributive liberal social contract...

We describe Hayek's position on taxation and its subsequent developments. Hayek defends the proportional tax system. If a majority rule corrects deviations from political power must also restrict the conditions of progressive taxation. According to Hayek the progressive tax system (SFP) violates...

By inverting Saez (2002)'s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize the redistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal) social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time and show great stability despite...

This paper estimates the marginal efficiency cost of redistribution (MECR) associated with a demogrant and an in-work benefit for the UK since 1979, taking account of extensive as well as intensive labour supply responses. The principal methodological advance in the paper is its greater...

Applied welfare analyses of redistributive systems nowadays benefit from powerful tax benefit microsimulation programs combined with administrative data. Arguably, most of the distributional studies of that kind focus on social welfare defined as a function - typically inequality or poverty...

By inverting Saez (2002)'s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize the redistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal) social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time and show great stability despite...