There is a rich literature analyzing the problems that will arise as the share of elderly and retired in the population increases in the near future. However, the locational decisions among the elderly as well as their implications in terms of taxes/transfers and of allocation of...

Paternalism, merit goods and specific egalitarianism are concepts we sometimes meet in the literature. The thing in common is that the policy maker does not fully respect the consumer sovereignty principle and design policies according to some other criterion than individuals' preferences. Using...

Recent literature on optimal nonlinear taxation has shown that in models with a single level of government public provision of private goods can help redistribution by mitigating self-selection constraints. The aim of the present paper is to extend the analysis to a fiscal federalism setting...

The focus of the present paper is on the intragenerational effects of nonlinear income taxation in a multiperiod framework. We investigate whether it is possible to achieve redistribution at smaller efficiency costs by enlarging the message space adopted in standard tax system (which only...

The incidence and efficiency losses of taxes have usually been analyzed in isolation from public expenditures. This negligence of the expenditure side may imply a serious misperception of the effects of marginal tax rates. The reason is that part of the marginal tax may in fact be a payment for...

This paper concerns redistribution and provision of public goods in an economic federation with two levels of government: a local government in each locality and a central government for the economic federation as a whole. We assume that each locality is characterized by two ability-types (high...

This paper addresses transboundary environmental problems in the context of an optimal tax problem, when part of the labor force is mobile across countries. The policy instruments include both commodity taxation and nonlinear income taxation. We show how the tax policy in a noncooperative...

This paper addresses optimal taxation, when the relationship between consumption and environmental damage is uncertain and treated as a random variable by policy makers. The main purpose is to analyze how additional uncertainty about this relationship affects the optimal unit tax on the...

We impose a horizontal equity restriction on the problem of finding the optimal utilitarian tax mix. The horizontal equity constraint requires that individuals with the same ability have to pay the same amount of taxes regardless of their preferences for leisure. Contrary to normal findings, we...

In this paper we examine the desirability of subsidizing child care expenditures in a model where parents can choose both the quantity and the quality of child care services they purchase in the market. Our vehicle of analysis is a Mirrleesian optimal tax framework where child care services not...