We wish to study optimal dynamic nonlinear income taxes. Do real world taxes share some of their features? What policy prescriptions can be made? We study a two period model, where the consumers and government each have separate budget constraints in the two periods, so income cannot be...

We make two main contributions to the theory of optimal income taxation. First, assuming conditions sufficient for existence of a Pareto optimal income tax and public goods mechanism, we show that if agents’ preferences satisfy an extended notion of single crossing called capacity constrained...

In this paper we address the time-inconsistency of optimal debt policy—the incentive for a current government to “manipulate interest ratesâ€â€”raised in Lucas and Stokey’s celebrated 1983 paper. The literature that followed suggested various ways to fully overcome...

Where the state evolves according to a discrete-state Markov chain, we sustain Lucas and Stokey's debt structure dynamics by having it emerge sequentially as the unique outcome of a sequence of choices made by two sequences of independent government departments. Each period a tax authority sets...

All developed countries have government debt, usually a sizeable proportion of output. This paper proposes that governments that cannot commit to future policy choices face a trade-off that explains the level of debt. On the one hand, the government would like to increase debt and delay...