I examine optimal taxes in an overlapping generations economy in which each consumer's utility depends on consumption relative to a weighted average of consumption by others (the benchmark level of consumption) as well as on the level of the consumer's own consumption. The socially optimal...

We study optimal monetary and fiscal policy in a model with heterogeneous agents, incomplete markets, and nominal rigidities. We develop numerical techniques to approximate Ramsey plans and apply them to a calibrated economy to compute optimal responses of nominal interest rates and labor tax...

The effects of income and consumption taxation are examined in the context of models in which the growth process is driven by the accumulation of human and physical capital. The different channels through which these taxes affect economic growth are discussed, and it is shown that in general the...

This paper studies the effects of human and physical capital income taxation on growth, and examines how these effects depend on the technologies for human capital accumulation and 'leisure'. It then derives the normative implications of the analysis for the optimal taxation of factor incomes....

This paper examines the effects of taxation of human capital, physical capital and foreign assets in a multi-sector model of endogenous growth. It is shown that in general the growth rate is reduced by taxes on capital and labor (human capital) income. When the government faces no borrowing...

Reserve requirements imposed against bank deposits, nominal interest payments on bank reserves (or on base money), and inflation can all be viewed as generating tax effects. Any analysis of optimal monetary policy in a steady-state equilibrium needs to consider the simultaneous choice of all the...

A country that decides to fix its exchange rate thereby gives up control over its own inflation rate and the determination of the revenue received from seigniorage. If the country goes further and uses a foreign money, it loses all seigniorage. This paper uses an optimal inflation tax approach...

In previous work (Eggertsson and Woodford, 2003), we characterized the optimal conduct of monetary policy when a real disturbance causes the natural rate of interest to be temporarily negative, so that the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates binds, and showed that commitment to a...

We propose an integrated treatment of the problems of optimal monetary and fiscal policy, for an economy in which prices are sticky and the only available sources of government revenue are distorting taxes. Our linear-quadratic approach allows us to nest both conventional analyses of optimal...