Altruism or `regard for others' can encourage self-restraint among generators of negative externalities, thereby mitigating the externality problem. We explore how introducing impure altruism into standard regulatory settings alters regulatory prescriptions. We show that the optimal calibration...

Previous literature has shown that public provision of private goods can be a welfare-enhancing device in second-best settings where governments pursue redistributive goals. However, three issues have so far been neglected. First, the case for supplementing an optimal nonlinear income tax with...

Previous literature has shown that public provision of private goods can be a welfare-enhancing device in second-best settings where governments pursue redistributive goals.However, three issues have so far been neglected. First, the case for supplementing an optimal nonlinear income tax with...

The incidence and efficiency losses of taxes have usually been analyzed in isolation from public expenditures. This negligence of the expenditure side may imply a serious misperception of the effects of marginal tax rates. The reason is that part of the marginal tax may in fact be a payment for...

Previous literature has shown that public provision of private goods can be a welfare-enhancing device in second-best settings where governments pursue redistributive goals. However, three issues have so far been neglected. First, the case for supplementing an optimal nonlinear income tax with...

The incidence and efficiency losses of taxes have usually been analysed in isolation from public expenditures. This negligence of the expenditure side may imply a serious misperception of the effects of marginal tax rates. The reason is that part of the marginal tax may in fact be payment for...

The incidence and efficiency losses of taxes have usually been analysed in isolation from public expenditures. This negligence of the expenditure side may imply a serious misperception of the effects of marginal tax rates. The reason is that part of the marginal tax may in fact be payment for...

Specialized theoretical and empirical research should in principle be embedded in a unified framework that identifies the relevant interactions among different phenomena, enables an appropriate matching of policy instruments to objectives, and grounds normative analysis in individuals' utilities...

This paper demonstrates that a pollution tax with a fixed cost component may lead, by itself, to segregation between clean and dirty firms without heterogeneous preferences or increasing returns. We construct a simple model with two locations and two industries (clean and dirty) where pollution...

We analyze the effects of a generalized class of negative consumption externalities (asymmetric and non-atmospheric) on the structure of efficient commodity tax programs. Households are not only concerned about consumption reference levels --- that is, they gain utility from "keeping up with the...