This Handbook entry presents a conceptual, normative overview of the subject of taxation. It emphasizes the relationships among the main functions of taxation—notably, raising revenue, redistributing income, and correcting externalities—and the mapping between these functions and various...

Our objective is to investigate, how the combination of habit formation with endogenous capital utilization decisions affects the process of economic growth. We find that in the presence of positive productivity growth, habit formation in consumption reduces the rate of capital utilization while...

This article explores subjects in optimal income taxation characterized by recent research interest, practical importance in light of concerns about inequality, potential for misunderstanding, and prospects for advancement. Throughout, the analysis highlights paths for further investigation....

When is a wealth tax preferable to a capital income tax? When is the opposite true? More generally, can capital taxation be structured to improve productivity, incentivize innovation, and ultimately increase welfare? We study these questions theoretically in an infinite-horizon model with...

Carroll and Kimball (1996) show that the consumption function for an agent with time-separable, isoelastic preferences is concave in the presence of income uncertainty. In this paper I show that concavity breaks down if we abandon time-separability. Namely, if an agent maximizing an isoelastic...