There is a secret paradox at the heart of social contract theories. Such theories assume that, because personal security and private property are at risk in a state of nature, subjects will agree to grant Leviathan a monopoly of violence. But what is to prevent Leviathan from turning on his...

In this paper a simple dynastic overlapping-generations model with homogeneous agents is used to analyze the optimal use of capital income tax, labor income tax and estate tax. The results of this analysis add to the conventional wisdom about capital income taxation: while it is true that in the...

This paper studies the Ramsey problem of optimal labor income taxation in a simple model economy which deviates from a first best representative agent economy in three important aspects, namely, flat rate second best tax, monopoly power in intermediate product market, and monopolistic wage...

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 provides a model of nonlinear income taxation in a context of international mobility. We consider two identical countries, in which each government chooses non-cooperatively redistributive taxes. It is shown that when skilled workers can move at low cost, the income taxation does not...

The recent general trend of cutting top marginal income tax rates in industrialized economies and the policy concern of enhancing competition in the US and the EU product markets subtly motivate the question if low income tax rates are optimal in an economy with imperfectly competitive markets....

There is very little evidence on the effects of the minimum wage on prices in the international literature and none whatsoever for developing countries. This paper analyzes the effects of the minimum wage on prices using monthly Brazilian household and price data from 1982 to 2000 aggregated at...

In this paper, we examine the determinants of low-wage employment in Portugal. For this purpose, we use a data file of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) for the years 1998 and 1999. In order to take into account unobserved heterogeneity in the data, a random-parameter logit model is...

Imposing liability on a company for sexual harassment by supervisors cannot be justified as promoting equality between the sexes, protection of workers, or protection of the owners of the company. Such liability might be justified to prevent breach of contract or behavior offensive to the...

The international literature on minimum wage greatly lacks empirical evidence from developing countries. Brazil’s minimum wage policy is a distinctive and central feature of the Brazilian economy. Not only are increases in the minimum wage large and frequent but also the minimum wage has been...