This paper studies the effects on electoral competition of political parties relying on monetary donations and volunteer labour for their electioneering activities. It also examines whether a recorded decline in party activism increases special-interest influence on party policy platforms....

Atkinson and Stiglitz show that with weakly separability, differential commodity taxes are unnecessary given an optimal nonlinear income tax. Deaton showed that with an optimal linear progressive income tax, commodity taxes are superfluous under weakly separable and linear Engel curves. Using...

This paper surveys the various forms of market failure that can arise when innovating entrepreneurs consider entering an industry, and outlines possible implications for public policy. Externalities can arise from entrepreneurial activities such as spillover benefits from new innovations and...

Tax evasion is modeled as a risky activity and integrated into a standard problem of optimal tax design. It is shown that there is a trade off between reducing tax evasion and reducing tax distortion. Thus it is efficient to supplement a broad-based wage tax by a tax on specific consumption if...

A fundamental issues in designing any fiscal regime for non-renewable resources is the balance between rent taxes and royalties. This paper reviews the core issues that arise, in terms of both efficient rent extraction and correcting various market failures. Issues of asymmetric information, for...

This paper analyzes optimal linear commodity taxes joint with non-linear income taxes. We provide optimal tax rules based on empirically observable elasticities. We demonstrate that commodities should be taxed/subsidized if doing so boosts labor supply. The critical role of commodity taxation is...

We study optimal nonlinear income taxation when earnings can differ because of both ability and luck, so the income tax has both a redistributive role and an insurance role. A substantial literature on optimal redistribution in the absence of uncertainty has evolved since Mirrlees’ original...

This paper sheds new light on the effects of the minimum wage on employment from a two-sided theoretical perspective, in which firms’ job offer and workers’ job acceptance decisions are disentangled. Minimum wages reduce job offer incentives and increase job acceptance incentives. We show...

This article contributes to the literature on stock market integration by developing and estimating a capital asset pricing model with segmentation effects in order to assess stock market segmentation and its effects on risk premia at the regional level. We show that the estimated degrees of...