Tradable black (CO2) and green (renewables) quotas gain in popularity and stringency within climate policies of many OECD countries. The overlapping regulation through both instruments, however, may have important adverse economic implications. Based on stylized theoretical analysis and...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

Using an intertemporal model of saving and capital accumulation we demonstrate that it is impossible for any binding minimum wage to increase the after-tax incomes of workers if the production function is Cobb-Douglas with constant returns to scale, or if there are no differences in ability...

This paper analyzes long run outcomes resulting from adopting a binding minimum wage in a neoclassical model with perfectly competitive labour markets and capital accumulation. The model distinguishes between workers of heterogeneous ability and capitalists who do all the saving, and it entails...

This paper studies the effect of Finnish tax reforms in the mid 1990s on the economic activity and tax avoidance decisions of the owners of small businesses. The reforms reduced income tax rates and increased tax planning incentives for small business owners. They applied only to unincorporated...

We discuss the effect of formal political institutions (electoral systems, fiscal decentralization, presidential and parliamentary regimes) on the extent and direction of income (re-) distribution. Empirical evidence is presented for a large sample of 70 economies and a panel of 13 OECD...

This paper studies the effect of child-care subsidies on parental labour supply. I use variation arising from changes in the municipality-specific supplement to Finnish child homecare allowance to identify the causal effect of subsidies on the labour force participation of parents. The variation...

This paper studies the design of tax systems that implement a planner’s second-best allocation in a market economy. An example shows that the widely used Mirrleesian (1976) tax system cannot implement all incentive-compatible allocations. Hammond’s (1979) “principle of taxation” proves...

The present study provides estimates of the Effective Marginal Tax Rates (EMTRs) for a sample of 17 OECD countries and 11 manufacturing sectors in a single framework encompassing capital, labour and energy taxes. Our cross-country/cross-sector approach allows us comparing the incentives provided...

We develop a theory of social planning with a concern for economic coercion, which we define as the difference between consumers’ actual utility, and the “counterfactual” utility they expect to obtain if they were able to set policy themselves. Reasons to limit economic coercion include...