This chapter reviews recent theoretical work on the effect of factor mobility and the ensuing tax competition on the capacity of governments to raise revenue and redistribute income. It focuses on three issues: the relevance and limitations of the "race to the bottom" result, the benefits and...

This paper studies the effects of piracy on prices and welfare and determines the optimal enforcement policy. A monopolist sells an information good at a non-linear price in two versions designed for two types of consumers with different willingness to pay. Consumers with low willingness to pay...

This paper studies the role of family size in the design of optimal income taxation. We consider a second best setting where the government observes the number of children and the income of the parents but not their productivity. With a linear tax schedule the marginal tax rate is shown to...

This paper studies the optimal non linear income tax of couples. We build a general unitary model of labor supply and allow multidimensional heterogeneity in a discrete type framework. We concentrate our analysis on the resulting intra-family labor allocation of labor supplies and show that this...

Unemployment insurance (UI) in some countries is one of the most widely used routes to early retirement. Accordingly, firms lay off elderly workers whose wages exceed their productivity. These workers then receive unemployment benefits until they enter formal retirement, even though they have...