The role of fiscal policy is examined when public goods provide both productive and utility services. In the presence of congestion, the consumption tax is shown to be distortionary. Optimal fiscal policy involves using consumption-based instruments in conjunction with the income tax. An income...

This paper explores the effects of inheritance taxation and income taxation on the growth rate in an endogenous growth model with altruistic parents. Human capital is accumulated according to the Standard Lucas specification. The government raises taxes in order to finance a non-productive...

Parental education largely determines a child's opportunity to learn. However, a higher level of trust and a higher frequency of social interactions between adults with significantly different educational attainments shrinks the knowledge-gaps among the adults, making their human capital more...

Benabou (2002) strengthens the so-called Efficient Redistribution Hypothesis (ERH) by demonstrating how income redistribution can promote growth and welfare by mitigating economic waste from resource misallocation that is caused by credit market frictions to production, which is subject to...

We study the strategic incentives of regional governments to allocate their budget to public investment and to public consumption expenditures against the background of an incentive-compatible redistribution policy set by the central government. Regional investment changes the productivity...

Financing productive public capital through distortionary taxes typically creates a trade-off: the optimal investment is determined as a compromise between efficiency-enhancing public investment and perturbing market efficiency, but is never socially optimal. In contrast, such a trade-off can...

This paper provides a general equilibrium model of income tax evasion. As functions of the share of income reported, the paper contributes an analytic derivation of the tax elasticity of taxable income, the welfare cost of the tax, and government revenue as a percent of output. It shows how an...

We study optimal income redistribution in a region that is creative in the sense of Richard Florida and thereby extend aspects of the recent analysis in Batabyal and Beladi (2017). Using the terminology of these researchers, members of the creative class are either artists or engineers. This...

We study optimal income redistribution in a region that is creative in the sense of Richard Florida and thereby extend aspects of the recent analysis in Batabyal and Beladi (2017). Using the terminology of these researchers, members of the creative class are either artists or engineers. This...

We study the properties of economic growth in a region that is driven by the activities of the so-called creative class. On the consumption side of our regional economy, we focus on an infinitely lived creative class household and on the production side of this same economy, we concentrate on a...