When - to cover the risk of underemployment - households oversupply labor to a labor market in which demand is down, a minimum wage set below the prevailing market wage can send the market wage down and unemployment up. Unemployment benefits can, by countering some of the risk of unemployment,...

If people's labor-supply decisions are taken at the level of the household, it is natural to expect aggregate demand and unemployment to influence the supply curve of labor. An increase in unemployment could prompt households to send more workers out in search of work to insure against the risk...

The optimal income tax problem, since it requires self-selection constraints which define nonconvex feasible sets, is one of the many problems in economics for which randomization in the solution may be desirable. For a two-class economy. we characterize the optimal random tax schedules and we...