1. Central Bankers, Bureaucratic Incentives, and Monetary Policy: An Introduction -- I. Structure of Central Bank Financing and Bureaucratic Rents -- 2. Monetary Policy: Theory and Practice -- 3. Inflationary Bias of the Federal Reserve System: A Bureaucratic Perspective -- 4. Preliminary...

Historically, governments contracted with private agents known as tax farmers to collect taxes. This paper develops a theoretical framework for determining when a welfare-maximizing government should choose tax farmers over bureaucratic tax collectors. While bureaucratic collectors have an...

A growing theoretical literature on optimal taxation predicts that governments will set the tax rates on money holdings and on more traditional tax bases to minimize the deadweight losses of collecting government revenue. Under the presumption that relative collection costs and tax bases have...

This paper extends the theory of optimal seigniorage to allow for money production costs. An important implication is tha t high money production costs, along with a requirement that the monet ary branch of government self-finance its operation, severs the connecti on between the tax rate on...