Progressive income taxes moderate wage demands by trade unions and thereby reduce unemployment, but alsothey reduce incentives to acquire skills and lower productivity of workers. The optimal response of the governmentto this dilemma is to choose a system of progressive taxes and to (partly)...

The equity premium is a key parameter in asset allocation policies. There is a vigorous debate in the literature regarding the actual measurement of the equity premium, its size and the determinants of its variation. This study aims to take stock of this literature by means of a meta-analysis....

This paper analyzes optimal linear taxes on capital and labor incomes in a life-cyclemodel of human capital investment, financial savings, and labor supply with heteroge-nous individuals. A dual income tax with a positive marginal tax rate on not onlylabor income but also capital income is...

We develop models of optimal linear and non-linear income taxation with endogenous human capital formation to explore optimal education subsidies. Optimal subsidies on education ensure efficiency in human capital accumulation and thus play an important role in alleviating the tax distortions on...

The most cost-effective policies for achieving CO2 abatement (e.g., carbon taxes) fail to get off the ground politically because of unacceptable distributional consequences. This paper explores CO2 abatement policies designed to address distributional concerns. Using an intertemporal numerical...

In einer modernen wissensintensiven Wirtschaft ist Humankapital der Schlüssel zur Sicherung des Arbeitskräfteangebots und des Produktivitätszuwachses. Humankapital wird nicht nur in Schulen, sondern auch in der Familie und in Betrieben gebildet. Daher ist ein Gleichgewicht von Arbeit und...

This paper employs an overlapping-generations model to explore the impact of public abatement on private investment and the intergenerational distribution of welfare. Whereas public abatement benefits the oldest generations in terms of non-environmental welfare, future generations gain most in...

Advances in information technology have improved the administrative feasibility of redistribution based on lifetime earnings recorded at the time of retirement. We study optimal lifetime income taxation and social insurance in an economy in which redistributive taxation and social insurance...