This paper studies second best policies for education, saving, and labour in an OLG model in which endogenous growth results from human capital accumulation. Government expenditures have to be financed by linear instruments so that growth equilibria are inefficient. The inefficiency is...

The paper analyses the European Union sub-national governments? tax revenue structures and their dynamic during the last decades. Tax composition obtained a considerable interest during the recent years, particularly after the recent global financial and economic crisis. In many European Union...

This paper studies the implications of (endogenously) directed technical change for the design of non-linear labor income taxes in a Mirrleesian economy augmented to include endogenous technology development and adoption choices by firms. First, I identify conditions under which any progressive...

A common assumption in the optimal taxation literature is that the social planner maximizes a welfarist social welfare function with weights decreasing with income. However, high transfer withdrawal rates in many countries imply very low weights for the working poor in practice. We reconcile...

A number of recent papers extend traditional Hotelling frameworks by the topical issue of climate change. They study the effects of different environmental taxes on the resource extraction paths and derive important and far-reaching policy implications. In particular the most recent strain of...

The diffusion of renewable electricity generating technologies is widely consid- ered as crucial for establishing a sustainable energy system in the future. However, currently the required transition is unlikely to be achieved by market forces alone. For this reason, many countries implement...

Discrimination of women in the labor market requires appropriate policy interventions. Affirmative action policies typically advocate the introduction of an employment quota uniformly applied to all firms. In a heterogeneous labor market such a policy may yield avoidable welfare losses. We...

The risk of catastrophes is one of the greatest threats by climate change. Yet, the most common Integrated Assessment Models produce the counterintuitive result that a higher concern about climate change risks does not lead to stronger near-term abatement efforts. This paper probes whether this...

Popular link functions often fit skewed binary data poorly. We propose the log-Burr link as flexible alternative. The link nests the complementary-log-log and logit link as special cases, determined by a shape parameter which can be estimated from the data. Shrinkage priors are used for the...

I construct risk-sensitive approximations of policy functions of DSGE models around the stochastic steady state and ergodic mean that are linear in the state variables. The method requires only the solution of linear equations using standard perturbation output to construct the approximation and...