Given its significance in practice, the piecewise linear tax system seems to have received disproportionately little attention in the literature on optimal income taxation. This paper offers a simple and transparent analysis of its main characteristics

Given its significance in practice, piecewise linear taxation has received relatively little attention in the literature. This paper offers a simple and transparent analysis of its main characteristics. We fully characterize optimal tax parameters for the cases in which budget sets are convex...

Despite its theoretical dominance, the empirical case in favor of the permanent income hypothesis is weak. Contrary to one of its basic implications, a growing body of evidence suggests that rich households save a higher proportion of their permanent income than poor households. We propose an...

This paper surveys three areas of applications of dynamic games: (i) transboundary pollution, (ii) exploitation of transboundary resources, and (iii) problems of the developing world: capital flights, foreign aid, war and peace. A refresher section introduces the basic ideas and solution...

We show that (i) subsidies for renewable energy policies with the intention of encouraging substitution away from fossil fuels may accentuate climate change damages by hastening fossil fuel extraction, and that (ii) the opposite result holds under some specified conditions. We focus on the case...

We study ownership dynamics when the manager and the large shareholder, both risk neutral, simultaneously choose effort and monitoring level respectively to serve their non-congruent interests.We show that there is a wedge between the valuation of shares by atomistic shareholders and the large...

This paper is a brief review of the literature on contests, with focus on rent-seeking. A fairly general contest model is presented. We show that the Tullock contest model and the first-prize sealed-bid auction model are obtained as special cases. Some important modifications of the basic model...

This paper presents a simple model of a common access fishery where fishermen care about relative performance as well as absolute profits. Our model captures the idea that status (which depends on relative performance) in a community influences a person's well-being. In our main specification,...

This paper presents a simple model of resource extraction where preferences are defined over the individual’s consumption level, her effort and the comparison of her consumption with that of other members of the community. Our specification captures the intuition that lies behind the growing...

This paper discusses the influence of public ownership on trade policy instruments. We demonstrate three important invariance results. First, the degree of public ownership affects neither the level of socially optimal activities nor welfare if the government chooses optimal trade policy...