This paper studies optimal taxation of entrepreneurial capital with private information and multiple assets. Entrepreneurial activity is subject to a dynamic moral hazard problem and entrepreneurs face idiosyncratic capital risk. We first characterize the optimal allocation subject to the...

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly...

Business income is important in the upper tail of the personal income distribution, but the extent to which it is captured by measures of personal income varies substantially across tax regimes. Using linked individual and firm data from Norway, we are able to attribute business income to...

We derive conditions under which cost-increasing measures - consistent with either regulatory constraints or fully expropriated taxes - can increase the profits of all agents active within a common-pool resource. This somewhat counterintuitive result is possible regardless of whether price is...

A large international literature has documented the labor market distortions associated with social security benefits for near-retirees. In this paper, we investigate the 'other side' of social security programs, seeking to document improvements in wellbeing arising from the provision of public...

There are many possible pathways between parental education, income, and health, and between child health and education, but only some of them have been explored in the literature. This essay focuses on links between parental socioeconomic status (as measured by education, income, occupation, or...

Census data from international sources covering 77% of the world's migrant population indicate that the skill composition of migrants in major destination countries, including the US, has been rising over the last 4 decades. Moreover, the population share of skilled migrants has been approaching...

We examine the incentive effects of transfer programs using a unique policy episode. Prior to 1989, social assistance recipients without children in Quebec who were under age 30 received benefits 60 percent lower than recipients older than 30. We use this sharp discontinuity in policy to...

This paper reports estimates of simple wage equations fit to cross-sectional and pseudo-longitudinal data for Canadian immigrants in the 1971 and 1981 Canadian censuses. The estimates are used to assess (1) the usefulness of cross-sectional analyses for measuring the pace of immigrant earnings...

We study optimal fiscal policy in a small open economy (SOE) with sovereign and private default risk. The SOE's government uses linear taxation to fund exogenous expenditures and uses public debt to inter-temporally allocate tax distortions. We characterize a class of environments in which the...