We study political competition in a simple Mirrleesian model of income taxation. The analysis is made tractable by exploiting the mechanism design formulation of the Mirrleesian problem. We consider basic variants of the Downsian model such as vote-share maximizing politicians, a winner-take-all...

We study political competition in an environment in which voters have private information about their preferences. Our framework covers models of income taxation, public-goods provision or publicly provided private goods. Politicians are vote-share-maximizers. They can propose any policy that is...

Recently, researchers have started to re-examine the so-called Atkinson-Stiglitz theorem on optimal commodity taxation. The essence of such research is to examine whether or not it is optimal to distort markets other than the labor market for achieving the second-best resource allocation. I...

We develop a theoretical framework in which political and economic cycles are jointly determined. These cycles are driven by three political economy frictions: policymakers are non-benevolent, they cannot commit to policies, and they have private information about the tightness of the government...

Commodities communicate. We investigate optimal indirect taxation when both the intrinsic qualities of goods and signaling motivate consumption choices. Optimal indirect taxes are introduced into a monotonic signaling game. We provide sufficient conditions for the uniqueness of the D1 sequential...

This work intends to specify a formula for the optimal taxation in Probabilistic Voting Models with Single Mindedness Theory. The goal is to find an equivalent expression to the Ramsey’s rule for a political economy environment where Governments are assumed to be Leviathans rather than...

In this article we write a two period taxation model where: \QTR{it}{i)} private information changes through time; \QTR{it}{ii)} savings choices by an agent that are not observed, \QTR{it}{iii)} affect preferences conditional on the realization of types. The simultaneous appearance of these three...

This paper examines properties of optimal poverty assistance programs under different informational environments using an income maintenance framework. To that end, we make both the income generating ability and the disutility of labor of individuals unobservable, and compare the resulting...

This paper examines how allowing individuals to emigrate to pay lower taxes changes the optimal non-linear income tax scheme in a Mirrleesian economy. Type-dependent participation constraints are borrowed from contract theory. An individual emigrates if his domestic utility is less than his...