This Handbook entry presents a conceptual, normative overview of the subject of taxation. It emphasizes the relationships among the main functions of taxation—notably, raising revenue, redistributing income, and correcting externalities—and the mapping between these functions and various...

This paper defines and studies optimality in a dynamic stochastic economy with finitely lived agents, and investigates the optimality properties of an equilibrium with or without sequentially complete markets. Various Pareto optimality concepts are considered, including interim and ex ante...

We propose an extended pay-as-you-go social security system that conditions pension benefits on the aggregate wage sum and on the wage of one's children. The latter increases parents' incentives to provide their children with good within-family education. However, since wages depend...

In an overlapping generations economy with incomplete insurance markets, the introduction of an employment fund-akin to the one introduced in Austria in 2003, also known as 'Austrian backpack'-can enhance production efficiency and social welfare. It complements the two classical systems of...

In this paper, we analyse the Czech social and tax systems and their impact on income distribution. We use regular household surveys, organized and published by the Czech Statistical Office (CSO), for years 1999 - 2002. This longer time span allows us to identify some trends in the Czech social...

In a stochastic economy with overlapping generations, fiscal policy affects the allocation of aggregate risks. The paper shows how to compute the welfare effects of marginal policy changes that shift risk across cohorts, in general and for an application to social security equity investments. I...

This paper presents the results of the actuarial valuation method Projected Unit Credit ("benefits/years of service") in order to assess the effects of the public sector downsizing on real economy and social security in Greece, using a prototype data set. We found a social security loss of about...

This paper uses a heterogeneous-agent overlapping-generations model to examine the fiscal and distributional consequences of introducing a means test in US Social Security. I find that a means test, that is, conditioning benefit payments on a household's earnings or assets, leads to a higher...

Households that postpone claiming Social Security benefits are, in effect, making additional purchases of the Social Security annuity and acquiring valuable longevity insurance. This paper investigates the impact of plausible variations of subjective mortality beliefs on the value of delayed...

In a moneyless market, a non storable, non transferable homogeneous commodity is reallocated between agents with single-peaked preferences. Agents are either suppliers or demanders. Transfers between a supplier and a demander are feasible only if they are linked, and the links form an arbitrary...