We study a large economy model in which individuals have private information about their productive abilities and their preferences. Moreover, there is aggregate uncertainty so that the social benefits from taxation and public goods provision are a priori unknown. The analysis is based on a...

The comparison between specific (per unit) and ad valorem (percentage) taxation has been one of the oldest issues in public finance. In Cournot markets, with deterministic costs structures, onventional wisdom has it that ad valorem taxation welfare-dominates specific. The objective of this paper...

In this paper, we study consumption risk sharing when individual income shocks are persistent and not publicly observable, and individuals can default on contracts at the price of financial autarky. We find that, in contrast to a model where the only friction is limited enforcement, our model...

In this paper the impacts of income and consumption taxes are analyzed within a model of stochastic endogenous growth with congestion. It is shown that the optimal amount of governmental input diminishes with uncertainty and that the optimal financing depends on the relation between the degrees...