What factors determine whether it is optimal with one or more technologies in a decarbonized road transport sector, and what policies should governments choose? We investigate these questions theoretically and numerically through a static, partial equilibrium model for the road transport market....

The paper provides a new formulation of the Mirrlees-Seade theo- rem on the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, under weaker assumptions and in a more general model. The formulation of the the- orem is independent of whether the model involves finitely many types or a continuous type...

We study the interdependence of optimal tax and expenditure policies. An optimal policy requires that information on preferences is made available. We first study this problem from a general mechanism design perspective and show that efficiency is possible only if the individuals who decide on...

The Atkinson-Stiglitz (1976) theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation when all agents have homogeneous, separable preferences is extended to allow for nonseparability with respect to endogenous variables that will be subject to distortions. The result is useful for analysing...

This paper extends the model of optimal income taxation due to Mirrlees (1971) and includes private information on public goods preferences. A mechanism design approach is used to establish the following result: If policies are required to be robustly implementable in the sense of Bergemann and...

We study a large economy model in which individuals have private information about their productive abilities and their preferences for public goods. A mechanism design approach is used to characterize implementable tax and expenditure policies. A robustness requirement in the sense of Bergemann...

The paper provides an extension and a new proof of Deaton's theorem on the undesirability of nonuniform excise taxation when income taxes are affine and preferences over consumption goods are separable from labour-leisure choices, homothetic, and identical across agents.

We characterize the Pareto-frontier in a simple Mirrleesian model of income taxation. We show how the second-best frontier which incorporates incentive constraints due to private information on productive abilities relates to the first-best frontier which takes only resource constraints into...

We study how an optimal income tax and an optimal public-goods provision rule respond to preference and productivity shocks. A conventional Mirrleesian treatment is shown to provoke manipulations of the policy mechanism by individuals with similar interests. We therefore extend the Mirrleesian...

The Mirrleesian model of income taxation restricts attention to simple allocation mechanism with no strategic interdependence, i.e., the optimal labor supply of any one individual does not depend on the labor supply of others. It has been argued by Piketty (1993) that this restriction is...