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...

We set up an OLG-model, where households both choose human capital investment and decide on investing their endogenous savings in a portfolio of riskless and risky assets, exposing them to (aggregate) wage and capital risks due to technological shocks. We derive the optimal public policy mix of...

The apparent ubiquity of progressive taxation in advanced democracies has animated research by political economists in the past decade, but little progress has been made in modeling political equilibria over tax policy when labor supply is elastic with respect to taxation. Here, we postulate an...

This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth in Poland and four types of taxes and human capital investment. We primarily rely on an exogenous growth model that merges the Mankiw-Romer-Weil model, augmented with learning-by-doing and spillover-effects, with selected elements...

What is the prescription of Ramsey capital taxation in the long run? Aiyagari (1995) addressed the question in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets (HAIM) economy, showing that a positive capital tax should be imposed to implement the so-called modified golden rule (MGR). This paper revisits...

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...

This chapter provides a review of some implications of demographic shift arising from population aging for fiscal policy, taxation policy, and social security settings. The key implications of population aging that have been forthcoming from the many national and international macroeconomic...

We provide an introduction to optimal fiscal and monetary policy using the primal approach to optimal taxation. We use this approach to address how fiscal and monetary policy should be set over the long run and over the business cycle. We find four substantive lessons for policymaking: Capital...

This chapter critically reviews the literature which explains why and under which circumstances governments accumulate more debt than it would be consistent with optimal fiscal policy. We also discuss numerical rules or institutional designs which might lead to a moderation of these distortions.