Rising fuel subsidies have contributed to fiscal pressures in India. A key policy concern regarding subsidy reform is the adverse welfare impact on households, in particular poor households. This paper evaluates the fiscal and welfare implications of fuel subsidy reform in India. Fuel subsidies...

The paper analyzes the labor market effects of globalization when foreign market entry is costly and risky. With flexible labor markets, a fall in foreign market entry cost tends to generate more income inequality. By contrast, when workers cannot easily switch industries and wages are...

How to explain rising income and wealth inequality? We build an original heterogeneous-agent model with three key features: (i) an explicit link between firm's market power and top income shares, (ii) a granular representation of the tax and transfer system, and (iii) three assets with...

This paper develops a Mirrlees (1971) framework with heterogeneous agents to analyze optimal redistributive taxes, optimal provision of public goods and the marginal cost of public funds (MCF). Standard MCF measures are shown to suffer from three defects: i) The MCF for the (non-individualized)...

The purpose of this paper is threefold. First, we survey the way in which the tax burden on labour has been proxied for in recent multi-country macro-economic studies. Second, we critically evaluate these proxies. Finally, we examine to what extent the conclusions of some studies change if some...

In this article we use contingent-claim analysis to calculate the effective tax rate (ETR) under corporate debt finance. In particular, we deal with both pure debt and two of the most well-known hybrid securities, i.e., convertible, and reverse convertible bonds. We show that: 1) effective...

How should pensions be taxed? In many cases pension savings are usually taxed more leniently than other forms of savings. What is the rationale for this? And are those concerns best targeted via taxation or mandatory pension savings? These issues are discussed with outset in the experience of...

This paper argues that the large reduction in corporate tax rates and only gradual widening of tax bases in many countries over the last decades are consistent with tougher international competition for foreign direct investment (FDI). To make this point we develop a model in which governments...

Theory suggests that large firms are more likely to engage in lobbying behaviour and are geographically more mobile than smaller entities. Conditional on jurisdiction size, policy choices are thus predicted to depend on the shape of a jurisdiction's firm size distribution, with more...

Theory suggests that large firms are more likely to engage in lobbying behaviour and are geographically more mobile than smaller entities. Conditional on jurisdiction size, policy choices are thus predicted to depend on the shape of a jurisdiction’s firm size distribution, with more...