Given its significance in practice, the piecewise linear tax system seems to have received disproportionately little attention in the literature on optimal income taxation. This paper offers a simple and transparent analysis of its main characteristics

We propose an overlapping generations economy where households care about relative consumption, the difference between their consumption and the consumption of their reference group. An individual's consumption is driven by the comparison of his lifetime income and the lifetime income of his...

This paper explains how, in the context of incomplete coordination among all countries, unilateral policies that might at first sight seem pro-green could actually turn out to harm the global environment. The free-riding motives and the difficulty of reaching an effective international...

Using a two-factor (labor and capital), two-good (shift-working and non shiftworking commodities) model with two countries (Home and Foreign) which are located in different time zones, we highlight the impact of trade in labor services (via communication networks) on the comparative advantage of...

We propose a new criterion which reflects both the concern for welfare (utility) and the concern for rights in the evaluation of economic development paths. The concern for rights is captured by a pre-ordering over combinations of thresholds (floors or ceilings on various quantitative...

We formulate a dynamic game model of trade in an exhaustible resource with a quantity-setting cartel. We compute the feedback Nash equilibrium and two Stackelberg equilibria under two different leadership scenarios: leadership by the strategic importing country, and leadership by the exporting...

This paper investigates the relationship between electoral incentives, institutions and corruption. We assume that voters use a yardstick criterion. The incumbent provides a public good and extracts rent, which are financed by imposing a distortionary tax. We demonstrate the possibility that...

Long run economic growth goes along with structural change. Recent work has identified explanatory factors on the demand side (non-homothetic preferences) and on the supply-side, in particular differential productivity growth across sectors and differences in factor proportions and capital...

There is growing interest in multi-sector models that combine aggregate balanced growth, consistent with the well-known Kaldor facts, with systematic changes in the sectoral allocation of resources, consistent with the Kuznets facts. Although variations in the income elasticity of demand across...

We propose a two-country monopolistic competition model of business service offshoring that captures the advantage conferred by time zone differences. We emphasize the role of the entrepreneurs, who decide how to produce business services (i.e., domestic service provision or service offshoring)....