Using a calibrated overlapping generations model we quantify the welfare gains of an age dependent income tax. Agents face uncertainty regarding future abilities and can by saving transfer consumption across periods. The welfare gain of switching from an age-independent to an age-dependent...

This paper examines the question of achieving a societal consensus around redistributive policies. Its extent is measured by the degree of work participation among the different skill classes that populate the economy. This consensus is driven both by the material incentives and heterogeneous...

The workhorse model of optimal taxation strongly recommends tagging, but its use in policy is limited. I argue that this puzzle is a symptom of a more fundamental problem. Conventional theory neglects the diverse normative criteria with which, as extensive evidence has shown, most people...

To what degree should societies allow inequality to be inherited? What role should estate taxation play in shaping the intergenerational transmission of welfare? We explore these questions by modeling altruistically-linked individuals who experience privately observed taste or productivity...

Optimal policy rules--including those regarding income taxation, commodity taxation, public goods, and externalities--are typically derived in models with homogeneous preferences. This article reconsiders many central results for the case in which preferences for commodities, public goods, and...

Whether observed differences in redistributive policies across countries are the result of differences in social preferences or efficiency constraints is an important question that paves the debate about the optimality of welfare regimes. To shed new light on this question, we estimate labor...

We use an extended Barro-Becker model of endogenous fertility, in which parents are heterogeneous in their labor productivity, to study the efficient degree of consumption inequality in the long run. In our environment a utilitarian planner allows for consumption inequality even when labor...

A substantial literature examines second-best environmental policy, focusing particularly on how the Pigouvian directive that marginal taxes should equal marginal external harms needs to be modified in light of the preexisting distortion due to labor income taxation. Additional literature is...

This paper examines optimal redistribution in a model with high- and low-skilled individuals with heterogeneous tastes for labor. We compare the extent to which optimal policies based on different normative criteria obey the principles of compensation (for differential skills) and responsibility...

This paper explores how the persistently popular "classical" logic of benefit-based taxation, in which an individual's benefit from public goods is tied to his or her income-earning ability, can be incorporated into modern optimal tax theory. If Lindahl's methods are applied to that view of...