Our tax system was designed for an economy with little or no inflation. The current paper shows that inflation causes capricious changes in the effective rate of tax on capital income and therefore in the real net rate of return that savers receive. This is not only a temporary disequilibrium...

Taxation of capital gains at realization may distort individuals' decisions regarding holding or selling during an asset's lifetime. This creates the problem of designing a tax structure for capital gains so as to induce efficient patterns of holding and selling. Several tax structures are...

This paper is concerned with tax policies designed to obtain an improved competitive allocation in the presence of consumption externalities. It is known that the full optimum can, in general, be attained only through the imposition of excise taxes at different levels for different individuals....

This paper presents a simple model of market equilibrium to explain why firms that maximize the value of their shares pay dividends even though the funds could instead be retained and subsequently distributed to shareholders in a way that would allow them to be taxed more favorably as capital...

An individual with known preferences over lotteries can be led to accept random wealth distributions different from his initial endowment by a sequential process in which some uncertainty is resolved and he is offered a new lottery in place of the remaining uncertainty. This paper examines the...

This paper presents an axiomatic characterization of a family of solutions to two-player quasi-linear social choice problems. In these problems the players select a single action from a set available to them. They may also transfer money between themselves. The solutions form a one-parameter...

This paper studies the efficient agreements about the dependence of workers' earnings on employment, when the employment level is controlled by firms. The firms' superior information about profitability conditions is responsible for this form of contract governance. Under plausible assumptions,...

Three main types of mortgages are fixed interest contracts which automatically fall due on the sale of a dwelling, fixed rate loans which are assumable by a buyer, and floating rate instruments. When interest rates rise, the fall in the economic value of these assets in savings and loan...