With capital-skill complementarity, the secular decline in the price of capital equipment due to equipment-specific technological progress (ESTP) keeps pushing up the demand for skilled relative to unskilled labor and raising the skill premium. This paper quantitatively characterizes the...

Der britische Finanzminister rechtfertigte die jüngste Senkung des Einkommensteuer- Spitzensatzes in Großbritannien mit optimalsteuertheoretischen Argumenten. Dieser Beitrag legt die zugrunde liegende Argumentation dar, die auf den Analysen im Mirrlees Review zum britischen Steuersystem...

Large and growing levels of public debt in the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and the Euro Area raise new interest in the cross-country effects of a large open economy's deficits. The authors consider a dynamic optimising model with costly tax collection and exogenously given public...

The author reviews recent studies that investigate how social status concerns influence individual preferences for redistribution and impact the design of optimal tax policies. He focuses on two aspects: the relevant dimension over which relative concerns are defined and the different...

This paper, intended for researchers, introduces a stochastic method for calculating the optimal tax schedule based on taxpayer utility, population skill distribution, and wages. It implements and extends the classic approach to optimal income tax calculation introduced by J.A. Mirrlees. A...

This study employs computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to estimate the effect of increase in value added tax (VAT), from 5 per cent to 7.5 per cent, on import demand and sectoral output in Nigeria. The study uses 2020 as the base year for the data analysis. The results show that increase...

We study the performance of heuristics relative to the performance of optimal solutions in the rich domain of sequential search, where the decision to stop the search depends only on the applicant's relative rank. Considering multiple variants of the secretary problem, that vary from one another...

This paper focuses on the question of whether or not a reduction of the knowledge barrier is good for welfare. Based on a dynamic monopoly setting with simultaneous investment decisions in process as well as in product Research & Development (R&D), we show that a reduction of the knowledge...

We develop a new approach for the identification of Pareto‐improving tax reforms. This approach yields necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Pareto‐improving reform directions. A main insight is that “Two brackets are enough”: When the system cannot be improved by...