The market for private life annuities is characterised by adverse selection, that is, contracts offer lower than fair payoffs to individuals with low life expectancy. Moreover, life expectancy and income have been found to be positively correlated. The paper shows that a linear tax on annuity...

We construct a tractable endogenous growth model with production externalities in which the public capital stock augments investment specific technological change. We characterize the first best fiscal policy and show that there exist several labor and capital tax-subsidy combinations that...

Standard models of tax evasion implicitly assume that evasion is either fully detected, or not detected at all. Empirically, this is not the case, casting into doubt the traditional rationales for interior evasion choices. I propose two alternative, dynamic explanations for interior tax evasion...

To design an optimal education policy, it is essential to account for the fertility differential between the poor and the rich because it affects the human capital investment through the child quantity-quality tradeoff of children. We develop a dynamic general equilibrium in which parents choose...

Facing unprecedented uncertainty and drastic trade-offs between public health and other forms of human well-being, policymakers during the Covid-19 pandemic have sought the guidance of epidemiologists and economists. Unfortunately, while both groups of scientists use many of the same basic...

Employers structure pay and employment relationships to mitigate agency problems. A large literature in economics documents how the resolution of these problems shapes personnel policies and labor markets. For the most part, the study of agency in employment relationships relies on highly...

This paper investigates efficiency losses caused by independent tax systems and proposes ways of remedying this coordination failure Whereas the harmful effects of tariff competition have been thoroughly explored in the trade policy literature little is known about the externalities that result...

This paper analyses how tax morale and countries’ institutional quality affect the shadow economy, controlling in a multivariate analysis for a variety of potential factors. The literature strongly emphasizes the quantitative importance of these factors to understand the level and changes of...

Using the currency demand approach size and development of the Colombian shadow economy are estimated over the period from 1976 to 2002. In the 70s the size fluctuated around 20% of official GDP and rose to 50% in the 90s. The most important factors driving the shadow economy are unemployment...

Using various methods estimates about the size of the shadow economy in 76 developing, transition and OECD countries are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (in percent of GDP) over 1989-93 in developing countries is 39 %, in transition countries 23 % and in OECD countries 12 %. An...