In order to investigate the interaction between tax policy, welfare benefits, the government technology for monitoring and sanctioning inadequate search, workfare, and externalities from work, we incorporate endogenous job search and involuntary unemployment into a model of optimal nonlinear...

This paper models unemployment as a binding nonnegativity constraint on hours worked in an optimal income tax problem with quasi-linear preferences. We show that bunching of workers resulting from this binding constraint provides a more convincing description of the bottom of the labor market...

This article reviews the literature on the optimal design and regulation of funded pension schemes. We first characterize optimal saving and investment over an individual’s life cycle. Within a stylized modeling framework, we explore optimal individual saving and investing behavior....

We study optimal social insurance aimed at insuring disability risk in the presence of linear income taxation. Optimal disability insurance benefits rise with previous earnings. Optimal insurance is incomplete even though disability risks are exogenous and verifiable so that moral hazard in...