This paper studies the optimal commodity taxation problem when time taken in consumption is a perfect substitute for either labor or leisure. It shows that while labor substitutability affects the optimal tax structure, leisure substitutability leaves the classical optimal tax results intact. In...

This paper derives optimal commodity taxes in a two-class economy, based on Chaudhuri (1986) and Diamantaras and Thomson's (1990) λ-equitability. An allocation is λ-equitable if no agent envies a proportion λ of the bundle of any other agent. We examine the properties of Pareto undominated...

An optimal commodity tax approach is taken to compare trade taxes and VATs when some commodities are produced informally. Trade taxes apply to all imports and exports, including intermediate goods while the VAT applies only to sales by the formal sector and imports. The VAT can achieve...

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...

This paper analyses the impact of labor market conditions on a firm's incentive to train its workers. In an equilibrium model of the labor market in which firms use both untrained and in-house trained workers, we show that the incidence of training increases with the tightness of the labor...

There has been a great deal of research on trade unions and wage contracts in recent year, but there has been relatively little work on the determinants of contract length. This is unusual given that the duration of union contracts has varied substantially in post-war industrial economies both...

This paper presents a new theory of gender discrimination in competitive labour markets which does not rely on any inherent gender asymmetries. Women and men are organized into households with each having identical household specific human capital. When labour market characteristics (effort,...

We study the optimal redistributive tax structure when the population can be disaggregated into tagged groups. We begin with the case in which the tag has no normative significance, but simply separates the population into identifiable groups with different distributions of ability-types. Under...

Through tax evasion, through the labour-leisure choice or in other ways, taxpayers reduce the tax base in response to an increase in the tax rate. The process is commonly-believed to generate a humped Laffer curve with a revenue-maximizing tax rate well short of 100%. That need not be so. In the...

We examine how the introduction of self-control preferences influences the trade-off between two fundamental components of a public pension system: the contribution rate and its degree of redistribution. The pension regime affects individuals' welfare by altering how yielding to temptation (i.e....