This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Pareto-improving tax reforms. The conditions can be expressed as sufficient statistics and have a wide range of potential applications in public finance. We discuss one such application in detail: the introduction of...

This paper studies the tax treatment of couples. We develop two different ap-proaches. One is tailored to the analysis of tax systems that stick to the principle that the tax base for couples is the sum of their incomes. One is tailored to the analysis of reforms toward individual taxation. We...

This paper studies a large majority election with voters who have heterogeneous, private preferences and exogenous private signals. We show that a Bayesian persuader can implement any state-contingent outcome in some equilibrium by providing additional information. In this setting, without the...

This paper analyses the role of ratification quotas in multilateral agreements over emission reduction. The higher is the quota, the lower is the level of emissions in case the agreement comes into force, but the higher is also the risk of failure. In a setting with incomplete information, two...

A uniform price for carbon is at the center of market-based approaches to climate policy. Actual climate policy, by contrast, has many sector-specific rules. This paper studies the desirability of the market-based approach using tools from the theory of taxation. It is found that a justification...

We introduce intergenerational transfers into a general equilihrium life-cycle model in order to explain observed levels of wealth heterogeneity. In our overlapping generations model, heterogenous agents face uncertain lifetime and leave both accidental and voluntary bequests to their cinldren....

We develop a model of political competition with endogenous turnout and endogenous platforms. Parties trade off incentivizing their supporters to vote and discouraging the supporters of the competing party from voting. We show that the latter objective is particularly pronounced for a party with...

We model the dynamics of endogenous organizational restructuring, where those being assigned positions in an organization can themselves lobby for who gets which position. Internal labor market changes depend on how much individuals value their own status in the organization, the organizational...

In many organizations, members need to be assigned to certain positions, whether these are legislators to committees, executives to roles, or workers to teams. I show that these assignment problems lead to novel questions about institutional stability. Will the set of agents being assigned...

In his seminal Social Choice and Individual Values, Kenneth Arrow stated that his theory applies to voting. Many voting theorists have been convinced that, on account of Arrow’s theorem, all voting methods must be seriously flawed. Arrow’s theory is strictly ordinal, the cardinal aggregation...