Government budget balance forces the endogenous use of distortionary tax instruments" when an exogenous reform is implemented. The aggregate efficiency of such reforms is based" on comparisons of simple summary measures of the Marginal Cost of Funds of the various tariff" or quota changes with...

Does taxation for public goods generally involve a distortionary cost? Are Pigouvian taxes desirable because they raise revenue without having to resort to distortionary taxes? Should decisions concerning public goods or Pigouvian taxes depend on whether their incidence is regressive? The answer...

Many of the most pernicious economic institutions and policies create entry barriers or manipulate factor prices to transfer resources from entrepreneurs and workers to groups that hold political power. These inefficiencies partly result from the fact that direct and efficient fiscal instruments...

We characterize a planner's optimal allocation of consumption and capital in an overlapping generations model with exogenous government purchases, privately-observed idiosyncratic shocks to the depreciation rate of capital, and a proportional cost of reversing investment to transform used...

When comparing marginal costs and benefits of a public project, most economists think in terms of adding together the marginal costs of production plus marginal costs of additional distortionary taxation. This paper clarifies how the "revenue effect" offsets the "distortionary effect." For...

This paper illustrates how one can use causal effects of a policy change to measure its welfare impact without decomposing them into income and substitution effects. Often, a single causal effect suffices: the impact on government revenue. Because these responses vary with the policy in...

We study the dynamic taxation of capital and labor in the Ramsey model under the assumption that taxes and public good provision are decided by a self-interested politician who cannot commit to policies. We show that, as long as the discount factor of the politician is equal to or greater than...