We study political competition in a simple Mirrleesian model of income taxation. The analysis is made tractable by exploiting the mechanism design formulation of the Mirrleesian problem. We consider basic variants of the Downsian model such as vote-share maximizing politicians, a winner-take-all...

We consider optimal joint nonlinear earnings taxation of couples. We use multi-dimensional mechanism design techniques to study this problem and show that the first-order approach - that restricts attention to only local incentive constraints - is valid for a broad set of primitives. Optimal...

Recently, researchers have started to re-examine the so-called Atkinson-Stiglitz theorem on optimal commodity taxation. The essence of such research is to examine whether or not it is optimal to distort markets other than the labor market for achieving the second-best resource allocation. I...

We develop a theoretical framework in which political and economic cycles are jointly determined. These cycles are driven by three political economy frictions: policymakers are non-benevolent, they cannot commit to policies, and they have private information about the tightness of the government...

Commodities communicate. We investigate optimal indirect taxation when both the intrinsic qualities of goods and signaling motivate consumption choices. Optimal indirect taxes are introduced into a monotonic signaling game. We provide sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of the D1 sequential...

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 studies habit formation in consumption preferences in a dynamic Mirrlees economy. We derive optimal labor and savings wedges based on a recursive approach. We show that habit formation creates a motive for subsidizing labor supply and savings. In particular, habit formation...

This paper studies Pareto-optimal risk-sharing arrangements in a private information economy with aggregate uncertainty and ex ante heterogeneous agents. I show how to implement Pareto-optima as equilibria when agents can trade claims to consumption contingent on aggregate shocks in financial...