This paper explores the relationship between the myopia, the solvency and the reputation of a government choosing the optimal financing policy given a particular path of government spending. A central result is the demonstration of a logical link between government myopia and insolvency in the...

In the coming decades, the share of people in working age will fall significantly in most developed countries. According to optimal taxation theory, public debts should be reduced before the baby-boom generation retires. I find that if debts are instead maintained at the current levels, welfare...

This Paper analyses the optimal timing of taxes on capital income. We show that the celebrated result that taxes should front-loaded with an initially high tax followed by a discrete jump to the steady state is knife-edge, hinging on capital having a constant depreciation rate. An empirically...

Economists traditionally tackle normative problems by computing optimal policy, ie the one that maximizes a social welfare function. In practice, however, a succession of marginal changes to a limited number of policy instruments are implemented, until no further improvement is feasible. I call...

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 aim of this Paper is to test for the extent of incompleteness in the market for US Government debt. We show that when a government pursues an optimal tax policy and issues a full set of contingent claims, the value of debt has the same or less persistence than other variables in the economy...

The implications of more environmental concern for the optimal provision of public goods, taxation, environmental policy and involuntary unemployment are derived within a second-best framework in which lump-sum taxes and subsidies are not available and labour supply is rationed due to a rigid...

Using a stochastic growth model we derive analytic expressions for optimal labour and capital tax rates under both complete and incomplete markets. We find taxes are driven by two factors reflecting : (a) Ramsey efficiency considerations and (b) the financing needs of the government which vary...

The answer to this question is "yes". We re-examine noncooperative and cooperative equilibria under perfect capital mobility. To this end, we develop a two-country optimal growth model with endogenous national fiscal policies. The channel for interdependence is distortionary income taxes. We...

In this Paper, we take the field of optimal dynamic taxation further in two directions. Using a model with invisible labour, as in Hansen (1986) and Rogerson (1988), we first explore the short-run dynamics of the capital-income tax, particularly whether the tax, under the second-best programme,...