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...

Individuals’ aversion to risk and inequality, and their concern for relative standing, are measured through experimental choices between hypothetical societies. It is found that on average individuals are both fairly inequality-averse and have a strong concern for relative income. The results...

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...

We investigate the importance of relative income within the Indian Caste system, using a choice experiment. We find that slightly more than half of the marginal utility of income comes from some kind of relative income effects, on average, which is comparable to the results from previous studies...

We find, using survey-experimental methods, that most individuals are concerned with both relative income and relative consumption of particular goods. The degree of concern varies in the expected direction depending on the properties of the good. However, contrary to what has been suggested in...

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...

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...