We consider an economy where production generates externalities, which can be reduced by additional firm level expenditures. This requires firms to raise outside financing, leading to deadweight loss due to a standard agency problem vis-à-vis outside investors. Policy is constrained as firms...

Aiyagari (1995) showed that long-run optimal fiscal policy features a positive tax rate on capital income in Bewley-type economies with heterogeneous agents and incomplete markets. However, determining the magnitude of the optimal capital income tax rate was considered to be prohibitively...

This chapter gives an overview of the male labour supply literature, focusing on what that literature implies for the design of the tax-transfer system. According to conventional wisdom, male labour supply is rather insensitive to tax rates. This, in turn, implies that the welfare losses from...

This paper incorporates a preference for distributive fairness (inequity aversion) into the analysis on optimal redistributive taxation under uncertainty. We can show that introducing or strengthening the taste for distributive fairness does not affect the socially optimal tax rate (social...

A general equilibrium model has been constructed in a stochastic endogenous growth economy driven by an Ito-Levy diffusion process. The minimum time to “economic maturity” for an underdeveloped economy has been computed both in the preference manifold of the modified Ramsey fashion and in...

Modern advances give us the ability to re-engineer the taxation system to benefit from computerized automation and the insights of modern psychology. People like to do things that bring a tangible reward. Tax-paying should be made FUN, not a chore. You will want to participate if you perceive a...

This paper compares the stochastic behavior of fiscal variables under optimal fiscal policy for the cases of full commitment by the government (Ramsey problem) and no commitment by the government (focusing on differentiable Markov perfect equilibrium). It shows that the cyclical properties of...

This paper studies the effect of habit formation on optimal capital taxes in a dynamic Mirrleesian model. We make three distinct contributions. First, we decompose intertemporal wedges (implicit capital taxes) for general time-nonseparable preferences into a wealth effect, a complementarity...

A win-win measure that will contribute to getting us out of the crisis is the abolition of the tax void in OECD countries. The tax void is explained with graphics and it is shown how it can be eliminated for free. Adjustment costs will lie in understanding and adaptation of administrative...

This paper investigates household decisions, and optimal taxation in an overlapping generations model in which individual utility depends on a weighted average of consumption of ones peers --- a ``keeping up with the Joneses'' consumption externality. In contrast to representative agent...