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...

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...