Atkinson and Stiglitz show that with weakly separability, differential commodity taxes are unnecessary given an optimal nonlinear income tax. Deaton showed that with an optimal linear progressive income tax, commodity taxes are superfluous under weakly separable and linear Engel curves. Using...

The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This paper examines the validity of this claim in an optimal income tax framework. Contrary to the recommendation...

A standard result in the optimal taxation literature is that, when agents differ in market ability and the government aims at redistributing from high - to low-skilled agents by means of an optimal nonlinear labor income tax and a set of commodity taxes, an optimally designed commodity tax...

Under standard assumptions, optimum commodity taxation (OCT) should target non-renewable resources (NRRs) in priority. NRRs should be taxed at a higher rate than otherwise-identical conventional commodities. NRR substitutes and complements should receive a particular tax treatment. When reserves...

This paper extends the standard model of optimum commodity taxation (Ramsey (1927) and Diamond-Mirrlees (1971)) to a competitive economy in which some markets are inefficient due to asymmetric information. As in most insurance markets, consumers impose varying costs on suppliers but firms cannot...

We show that the optimal property tax rate rises with the ratio of land rents to structure and land development costs. California's high ratio of income to property tax revenue and the distribution of Federal housing subsidies thus appear geographically misplaced. Proportional taxation of...

This paper studies second best policies for education, saving, and labour in an OLG model in which endogenous growth results from human capital accumulation. Government expenditures have to be financed by linear instruments so that growth equilibria are inefficient. The inefficiency is...

This paper shows that the combination of habit formation - present consumption creating additional consumption needs in the future - and myopia may explain why some retirees are forced to 'unretire', i.e., unexpectedly return to work. It also shows that when myopia about habit formation leads to...

Unconventional fiscal policy uses announcements of future increases in consumption taxes to generate inflation expectations and accelerate consumption expenditure. It is budget neutral and time consistent. We exploit a unique natural experiment for an empirical test of the effectiveness of...

Habits are an important cause of sluggish consumption adjustment in response to price shocks. This paper studies shifts within the consumption bundle under endogenous habit formation. I put forward a model with good-specific, or 'deep', habits that cause persistence in good-specific consumption....