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...

We propose a dynamic version of the standard two-party electoral competition model adapted to nonlinear income taxation. The theory has a number of desirable features. First, equilibria always exist, even though the set of admissible tax policies is multidimensional. Second, the Nash set can be...

We analyze the effects of a generalized class of negative consumption externalities (asymmetric and non-atmospheric) on the structure of effcient commodity tax programs. Households are not only concerned about consumption reference levels - that is, they gain utility from keeping up with the...

This articles studies the optimal tax mix (taxes on income and commodities) under asymmetric information in a two-type model, when individuals make relative consumption comparisons. The model includes both positional and nonpositional goods, taking into account the fact that relative concerns...

This paper extends the previous literature on optimal redistributive taxation in the presence of externalities to a multi-externality setting. While taxes on income and on 'clean' commodities are still unaffected by the externalities, which confirms previous results, I find that the existence of...

Non-linear income taxes and linear commodity taxes are analysed when people differ with respect to ability, high-skilled agents have heterogeneous preferences, and neither individual abilities nor preferences are observable. The paper highlights how informational constraints may motivate...

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...

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...

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...

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...