We set out a simple four sector macro model of the economy of the Roman Empire during a period of considerable economic prosperity. Our focus is on gold coins as currency and the seignorage which the government used to fund its activities. We solve numerically for a balanced growth...

Economists do not understand how bargains are struck. A bargain is the sharing of a pie between two or more people who are collectively entitled to the pie but cannot appropriate it until they agree how large each person's slice is to be. We know that people do strike bargains and that civilized...

It has long been recognized that solving the logical omniscience problem requires using some kind of nonstandard possible worlds. While many such logics have been proposed, none has an obvious claim as the "right" logic to use to describe the reasoning of agents who are not logically omniscient....

We know that people strike bargains and that civilized life could not proceed otherwise. We do not know how bargains are struck. We have no explanation of bargaining, comparable to the general equilibrium in the economy, accounting for essential features of bargaining as we know it with...

This paper examines the second-best tax policy to minimize envy in the sense of Chaudhuri (1986) and Diamantaras and Thomson (1990). An allocation is $\lambda$-equitable if no agent prefers a proportion $\lambda$ of any other agent's bundle. We study the allocations that maximize $\lambda$ among...

Important as it is for public policy, there is still no consensus about the size of the revenue-maximizing tax rate at the top of the Laffer curve. The purpose of this essay is not to supply a correct rate, but to identify difficulties in doing so. 1) Estimates of the revenue-maximizing tax rate...

Tax analysis and forecasting of revenues are of critical importance to governments in ensuring stability in tax and expenditure policies. To augment timely and effective analysis of the revenue aspects of the fiscal policy, governments have increasingly turned toward in-house tax policy units...

A common, though by no means universally-accepted doctrine among practitioners of law and economics is that redistribution is no business of the law. This efficiency-only doctrine is not that redistribution is unworthy as a social objective, but that any given benefit to the poor is attainable...

The purpose of this paper is the construction of a framework to evaluate the relative incentives for investment created by the differential taxation of income from capital in the manufacturing, mining and petroleum sectors of the Canadian economy. This analysis does not deal with the issue of...

Since 1989 the Government of Viet Nam has undertaken a series of fundamental economic reforms that have increased the use markets to set prices and enhanced the role of the non-state sector in the production and distribution of goods and services. During this time Viet Nam has opened up its...