This paper deals with tax-policy responses to quasi-hyperbolic discounting. Earlier research on optimal paternalism typically abstracts from capital mobility. If capital is mobile between countries, it may no longer be possible for national governments to control domestic savings via capital...

The optimal provision of a state-variable public good, where the global climate is the prime example, is analyzed in a model where people care about their relative consumption. We consider both keeping-up-with-the-Joneses preferences (where people compare their own current consumption with...

This paper concerns optimal redistributive non-linear income taxation in an OLG model, where people care about their own consumption relative to (i) other people's current consumption, (ii) own past consumption, and (iii) other people's past consumption. We show that both (i) and (iii) affect...

This paper deals with optimal income and commodity taxation in an economy, where alcohol is an externality-generating consumption good. In our model, alcohol can be bought domestically, imported, or produced illegally. Border trade alone implies an incentive to set the domestic alcohol tax below...

This paper concerns optimal taxation and public goods in an economic federation with decentralized leadership, where one lower level government is the first mover also in the horizontal dimension. Under plausible assumptions, horizontal leadership reinforces the incentives created by...

Following the 1987 report by The World Commission on Environment and Development, the genuine saving has come to play a key role in the context of sustainable development, and the World Bank regularly publishes numbers for genuine saving on a national basis. However, these numbers are typically...