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...

We construct a general equilibrium model of a two-country trading block where governments through tax policies attract mobile capital, and provide an imported public consumption good. At Nash equilibrium, when the public good is under-provided, (i) a country with a large GDP, has a large Nash...

An important issue in public policy debates is the effect of international migration on welfare in source and host countries. We address this issue by constructing a general equilibrium model of a two-class source or host country. Each country produces many traded and non-traded goods, uses...

Using an OLG model with skill uncertainty and private savings, we investigate whether an optimally designed set of public pension transfers can usefully supplement a nonlinear labor income tax as a welfare-enhancing policy instrument. We consider a Mirrleesian setting where agents' skills are...

We integrate social exclusion, operationalized in terms of long-term unemployment, into the theory of optimal redistributive taxation. Our results show how an optimal mix of education policy, public employment, and support to the unemployed, in conjunction with optimal income taxation,...

We consider a two small open economies model with cross-border pollution that is generated from consumption. Within this framework we examine i) the non-cooperative equilibrium consumption taxes and compare them to when pollution is only local, ii) the cooperative equilibrium consumption taxes...

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...

In this paper we examine the desirability of subsidizing child care expenditures in a model where parents can choose both the quantity and the quality of child care services they purchase in the market. Our vehicle of analysis is a Mirrleesian optimal tax framework where child care services not...

This paper highlights the possibility that negative marginal tax rates arise in an intensive-margin optimal income tax model where wages are exogenous and preferences are homogeneous, but where agents differ both in skills (labor market productivity) and their needs for a work-related...

We study the joint design of nonlinear income and education taxes when the government pursues redistributive objectives. A key feature of our setup is that the ability type of an agent can affect both the costs and benefits of acquiring education. Market remuneration of agents depends on both...