Does monopsony on the labor market in itself justify the implementation of a minimum wage when it would not be used in a competitive economy? This issue is studied in a model of optimal taxation. We adopt a definition most favorable to the minimum wage: the minimum wage is useful whenever it can...

This paper reexamines the efficiency of participation with heterogeneous workers in a search-matching model with bargained wages and free entry. Assuming that firms hire their best applicants, we state that participation is insufficient whatever workers' bargaining strengths. The reason for this...

This paper reexamines the e ciency of participation with heterogeneous workers in a search-matching model with bargained wages and free entry. As- suming that rms hire their best applicants, we state that participation is insu cient whatever workers' bargaining strengths. The reason for this is...

We study the optimal taxation problem in an economy composed of two-person households (men and women), where agents influence their own old-age dependency prospects through health spending. It is shown that the utilitarian social optimum can be decentralized by means of lump sum transfers from...

This paper analyzes optimum income taxation in a model with endogenous job destruction that gives rise to unemployment. It is shown that optimal tax schemes comprise both payroll and layoff taxes when the state provides public unemployment insurance and aims at redistributing income. The optimal...

This paper studies how oil owners can benefit from carbon taxation. We build a Hotelling-like model with three energy resources: oil (exhaustible, polluting), coal (non exhaustible, very polluting) and solar energy (non exhaustible, non polluting). The CO2 concentration must be kept under a...

This paper puts forward an explanation of the rapid increase in golden handshake provision in Europe over the last ten years, based on both enhanced investor protection and attractive tax codes for severance pay. This article takes up a framework in which asymmetric information about the quality...

There is a capital taxation puzzle in most developed countries. Since the 1960s, revenues from wealth transfer taxation have been especially low and decreasing as a percentage of GDP, even to the extent of disappearing in quite a number of cases; by contrast, lifetime wealth or capital taxation...

During the last twenty years, microsimulation models have been increasingly applied in qualitative and quantitative analysis of public policies. This paper provides a discussion on microsimulation techniques and their theoretical background as a tool for the analysis of public policies with...

This paper examines how a government should intervene when agents make, for different reasons, choices that have long term detrimental effects on their survival prospects. We consider an economy where some agents make risky choices (here sin good consumption) out of myopia, and regret their...