We give an objective meaning to the concept of taxable capacity and establish a theoretical link between Optimal Taxation Theory (OTT) and the proposals of the Carter and Meade Reports, solving at the same time Kay’s (2008) criticism to both approaches.

We perform development accounting in accordance with Weil (2005, 2007) in a cross-state analysis of India. Results of similar magnitude are found, demonstrating that health can account for 1% to 18% of income differences depending on the health measure.

This paper concerns optimal taxation and public goods in an economic federation with decentralized leadership, where one lower level government is the first mover also in the horizontal dimension. Under plausible assumptions, horizontal leadership reinforces the incentives created by...

The Samuelson tax is a neutral business income tax on the normal return on capital only. I discuss two modifications of the Samuelson tax in order to include pure profits in its tax base, but still achieve neutral business taxation.

The generalised Lorenz criterion is widely used for making welfare comparisons within and across countries on the basis of their income distributions. Experimental studies have challenged this way of proceeding by showing that the principle of transfers, which underlies the generalised Lorenz...

Using data on inequality for 21 OECD countries over the period 1870–2011 this paper tests the Piketty hypothesis that income inequality is likely to grow in the 21st century. It is shown that the null hypothesis of trend stationarity of inequality cannot be rejected at conventional...