Economic thought on climate policy as an instance of environmental regulation is strongly influenced by the principle of a uniform carbon price. Economists acknowledge that this principle breaks down in a second-best world with other distortions, such as taxes and market power in domestic and...

We analyze the role of optimal income taxation across different local labor markets. Should labor in large cities be taxed differently than in small cities? We find that a planner who needs to raise revenue and is constrained by free mobility of labor across cities does not choose equal taxes...

We develop a unifying framework for optimal income taxation in multi-activity economies with general production technologies. Agents are characterized by an N-dimensional skill vector that captures intrinsic abilities in N activities. The private return to each activity depends on individual...

This chapter examines government policy alternatives for protecting the environment. We compare environmentally motivated taxes and various non-tax environmental policy instruments in terms of their efficiency and distributional impacts. Much of the analysis is performed in a second-best setting...

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 current financial crisis has brought Europe to a critical juncture. In this paper, we map the fiscally United States of Europe. We simulate an optimal EU-wide income tax and calculate the implied cross-country transfers. The comparison of the implied transfers with the real transfers shows...