We study how strongly individuals respond to tax simplicity and how they learn about the complexities of the tax system. We use new French tax returns data on the self-employed from 1994 to 2012. France has three fiscal regimes for the self-employed, which differ in their monetary tax incentives...

This paper shows that the output losses from energy taxes are significantly larger than usually computed when due account is taken of imperfect competition among energy using firms. Even with perfect competition among these firms, the loss in GNP is of the same order of magnitude as the revenue...

We reconsider the optimal taxation of income from labor and capital in the stochastic growth model analyzed by Chari et al. (1994, 1995), but using a linear-quadratic (LQ) approximation to derive a log-linear approximation to the optimal policy rules. The example illustrates how inaccurate...

"In previous work (Eggertsson and Woodford, 2003), we characterized the optimal conduct of monetary policy when a real disturbance causes the natural rate of interest to be temporarily negative, so that the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates binds, and showed that commitment to a...

In previous work (Eggertsson and Woodford, 2003), we characterized the optimal conduct of monetary policy when a real disturbance causes the natural rate of interest to be temporarily negative, so that the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates binds, and showed that commitment to a...