This paper deals with tax-policy responses to quasi-hyperbolic discounting. Earlier research on optimal paternalism typically abstracts from capital mobility. If capital is mobile between countries, it may no longer be possible for national governments to control domestic savings via capital...

Using a calibrated overlapping generations model we quantify the welfare gains of an age dependent income tax. Agents face uncertainty regarding future abilities and can by saving transfer consumption across periods. The welfare gain of switching from an age-independent to an age-dependent...

Optimal policy rules--including those regarding income taxation, commodity taxation, public goods, and externalities--are typically derived in models with homogeneous preferences. This article reconsiders many central results for the case in which preferences for commodities, public goods, and...

A substantial literature examines second-best environmental policy, focusing particularly on how the Pigouvian directive that marginal taxes should equal marginal external harms needs to be modified in light of the preexisting distortion due to labor income taxation. Additional literature is...

This paper deals with tax-policy responses to quasi-hyperbolic discounting. Earlier research on optimal paternalism typically abstracts from capital mobility. If capital is mobile between countries, it may no longer be possible for national governments to control domestic savings via capital...

The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This paper examines the validity of this claim in an optimal income tax framework. Contrary to the recommendation...

Adaptation is omnipresent but people systematically fail to correctly anticipate the degree to which they adapt. This leads individuals to make inefficient intertemporal decisions. This paper concerns optimal income taxation to correct for such anticipation-biases in a framework where consumers...

This paper analyzes the implications of social identity and self-categorization in the context of optimal redistributive income taxation. A two-type model is supplemented by an assumption that individuals select themselves into social categories, in which norms are formed and education effort...

This paper analyzes whether marginal taxation of labor and capital income might be useful second best instruments for internalizing the externalities caused by conspicuous housing consumption, when the government is unable to implement a first best corrective tax on housing wealth. The rationale...