When deciding on the social desirability of public investment, the cost of a project is sometimes adjusted by a factor known as the Marginal Cost of Public Funds (MCPF) which captures the cost of raising public funds through distortionary taxation. However, there is no scholarly consensus on...

This paper studies the implications of an increase in the price of necessities, which disproportionally hurts the poor, for optimal income taxation. Our analyses show that, when the government is utilitarian and disutility from labor supply is linear, the optimal net nominal tax schedule is...

The social cost of carbon is the central economic measure for aggregate climate change damages and functions as a metric for optimal carbon prices. Previous literature shows that inequality significantly influences the level of the social cost of carbon, but mostly neglects a major source of...

We introduce a computationally tractable dynamic equilibrium model of the automobile market where new and used cars of multiple types (e.g. makes/models) are traded by heterogeneous consumers. Prices and quantities are determined endogenously to equate supply and demand for all car types and...

Almost all theoretical work on how to calculate the marginal deadweight loss has been done for linear taxes and for variations in linear budget constraints. This is quite surprising since most income tax systems are nonlinear, generating nonlinear budget constraints. Instead of developing the...

Tradable black (CO2) and green (renewables) quotas gain in popularity and stringency within climate policies of many OECD countries. The overlapping regulation through both instruments, however, may have important adverse economic implications. Based on stylized theoretical analysis and...

We consider a sequential game in which one player produces a public good and the other player can influence this decision by making an unconditional transfer. An efficient allocation requires the Lindahl property: the sum of the two (implicit) individual prices has to be equal to the resource...

In this paper, we consider how the retirement age as well as a tax financed pension system ought to respond to a change in the standard deviation of the length of life. In a first best framework, where a benevolent government exercises perfect control over the individuals' labor supply and...

How much information should governments reveal to consumers if consumption choices have uninternalized consequences to society? How does an alternative tax policy compare to information disclosure? We develop a price theoretic model of information design that allows empiricists to identify the...