A business tax is neutral if it does not effect the firms' decisions at the margin. We analyze the effect of a business tax on the firms' investment decision. The "implicit rent deduction" and "immediate write-off" methods are found to be special cases of our general tax design. The implication...

We study the optimal redistributive tax structure when the population can be disaggregated into tagged groups. We begin with the case in which the tag has no normative significance, but simply separates the population into identifiable groups with different distributions of ability-types. Under...

This paper studies multi-stage processes of non-cooperative voluntary provision of public goods. In the first stage, one or more players announce contributions that may be conditional on the subsequent contributions of others. In later stages, players choose their own contributions and fulfill...

This paper derives conditions under which prices may be set proportional to margin cost in some sectors of the economy when fixed distortions exist in other sectors. Two simple neo-classical economies are considered -- one with fixed producer prices and one with variable producer prices. In the...

This paper studies the simultaneous determination of the socially optimal levels of unemployment insurance, income taxation and experience rating. Earlier work uses models in which there is no point for government intervention. There is only a rationale for state unemployment insurance when...

This paper presents a synthesis of the way that corporation income tax influences the capital accumulation decision of a dynamic neoclassical firm. Relative and absolute prices for capital goods are allowed to change, adjustment costs are considered, investment tax incentives are investigated,...

In this paper, we characterize a mechanism for reducing pollution emissions in which countries, acting non-cooperatively, commit to match each others' abatement levels and may subsequently engage in emissions quota trading. The analysis shows that the mechanism leads to efficient outcomes. The...

The importance and complexity of petroleum and hard minerals operations is matched by the importance and complexity of finding effective ways to tax them. Many of these challenges arise in other activities too (exhaustibility of deposits being the main exception), but they take such extreme form...

The paper estimates a life-cycle model of consumption, saving, and wealth accumulation from disaggregated time series data containing an explicit age dimension. Highly significant age effects indicate the importance of age disaggregated analysis. Interest elasticities of saving are considerably...