This paper estimates the marginal efficiency cost of redistribution (MECR) associated with a demogrant and an in-work benefit for the UK since 1979, taking account of extensive as well as intensive labour supply responses. The principal methodological advance in the paper is its greater...

Climate change economics mostly neglects sizeable interactions of carbon pricing with other fiscal policy instruments. Conversely, public finance typically overlooks the effects of future decarbonization efforts when devising instruments for the major goals of fiscal policy. We argue that such a...

This paper deals with the consequences of the assumption of negatively interdependent preferences for the shape of the optimal nonlinear income tax and the effcient level of public good provision in a setting where the policy maker maximizes an inequality averse social welfare function and the...

Tax competition for mobile capital can undermine the attempts of governments to redistribute income from rich to poor. I study whether international tax coordination can alleviate this problem, using a general equilibrium model synthesizing recent contributions to the tax competition literature....

We analyze optimal taxation of labor and capital income in a life-cycle framework with idiosyncratic income risk. We provide a novel decomposition of labor income tax formulas into a redistribution and an insurance component. The latter is independent of the social welfare function and...

We analyze optimal taxation of labor and capital income in a life-cycle framework with idiosyncratic income risk. We provide a novel decomposition of labor income tax formulas into a redistribution and an insurance component. The latter is independent of the social welfare function and...

This paper extends the previous literature on optimal redistributive taxation in the presence of externalities to a multi-externality setting. While taxes on income and on 'clean' commodities are still unaffected by the externalities, which confirms previous results, I find that the existence of...

In a broader sense the welfare state ex ante can be seen as a social insurance for life-time risks, and ex post as a redistribution mechanism of incomes. Sinn (1995) has developed a normative theory of the welfare state in this view. On a constitutional plain agents determine the amount of...

By inverting Saez (2002)'s model of optimal income taxation, we characterize the redistributive preferences of the Irish government between 1987 and 2005. The (marginal) social welfare function revealed by this approach is consistently comparable over time and show great stability despite...

How is the optimal level of Pigouvian taxation influenced by distributive concerns? With second-best instruments, a higher level of income redistribution calls for a lower level of Pigouvian taxation. More redistribution implies higher distortions from income taxation. Pigouvian tax revenues...