This paper studies optimal taxation of entrepreneurial capital and financial assets in economies with private information. Returns to entrepreneurial capital are risky and depend on entrepreneurs' effort, which is not observed. The presence of idiosyncratic risk in capital returns implies that...

The emergence of medieval markets has been seen in the literature as hampered by lack of contract enforcement and institutions like merchants’ communal responsibil-ity. Merchants traveling to a different marketplace could be held liable for debts in-curred by any merchant from their...

This paper provides a theory of government intervention, such as government ownership, regulation, mandatory public schooling, subsidies, and industrial policy, as an optimal policy response due to the inability to commit not to expropriate private investment or bail agents out. If the...

We study the volatility of growth rates and find that it differs systematically across countries. Our empirical investigation reveals that there is a high correlation between disparity in political regimes across countries and differences in volatility. This is not the case for some of the...

We explore the implications of recursive utility for the conduct of fiscal policy.

When the government must decide not only on road public-policy programs (like investment in infrastructure) but also on the provision of group-specific public goods (like regional transfers or subsidies), dynamic strategic inefficiencies arise. I present a model where the struggle between...