We find evidence consistent with the hypothesis that governments in poor countries have a more left wing rhetoric than those in OECD countries. A possible explanation is that corruption, which is more widespread in poor countries, reduces the electoral appeal of capitalism more than that of...

Bad policies (i.e., policies harmful to private producers such as excessive taxation, arbitrary confiscation, and negligence of pubic goods) are observed in quite a few countries. These countries tend to have autocratic regimes.I explore a reason why bad policies may benefit autocrats.I present...

Stackelberg differential games are useful settings in which optimal government policies can be studied. This paper argues that the analysis of these games involves a key technical issue. In particular, we question the necessity for optimality of one boundary condition invoked in existing...

Optimal tax policies in dynamic models have unappealing features. In particular, optimal tax reform typically involves a large initial accumulation of government assets which is responsible for a large part of the welfare gains from optimal tax reform. In this paper, we investigate the...

This paper examines the effect of inequality on growth among the sub- national states in India. Theoretically, growth of the regional economy is driven by productive public investment in the provision of health and education services financed by a linear output tax, and the optimum tax rate is...

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 contrast equilibrium and welfare analysis in the rental housing market under two property rights regimes – eviction rights and security of tenure – when tenants face moving costs. A tenant’s idiosyncratic benefit from his unit and a landlord’s idiosyncratic profit from conversion are...

Standard official measures of economic well-being are based on money income. The general consensus is that such measures are seriously flawed because they ignore several crucial determinants of well-being. We examine two such determinants-household wealth and public consumption-in the context of...

The tax office wins most cases in Japan. We think about why this might be. We find that although judges who rule in favor of the taxpayer do not suffer in their future careers, if the loser-- whether governemnt or taxpayer--appeals and wins, the reversed judge's career does take a turn for the...

Regarding the trade-off between the depth and the duration of recessions, there exists a mounting empirical evidence of the idiosyncratic and non-synchronized behavior of the business cycle over time within and across countries. In this paper, I propose a stochastic dynamic general equilibrium...