Incomplete information is a commitment device for time consistency problems. In the context of time consistent labor income taxation privacy can lead to a Pareto superior outcome and increases the effectiveness of public education as a second best policy.

This paper considers education investment and public education subsidies in closed and open economies with an extortionary government. The extortionary government in a closed economy has incentives to subsidize education in order to overcome a hold-up problem of time consistent taxation, similar...

This paper compares education investment in closed and open economies without government and with a benevolent government. The fact that the time consistency problem in taxation can make labor mobility beneficial even if governments are fully benevolent – which is known from other contexts –...

This paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. People compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. The government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well...

Restrictions on work hours are more important in countries with a large welfare state. We show that this empirical observation is consistent with the strategic effects of such restrictions in a welfare state in the context of optimal direct taxation in the tradition of Mirrlees (1971). Our...

In Europe, the competence for social security and the right to levy income tax lie with the country of employment in cross-border matters. This has two disadvantages. First, the Employment Principle distorts active persons' choice of place of work. Second, the employment-based regulation of...

Economists traditionally tackle normative problems by computing optimal policy, i.e. the one that maximizes a social welfare function. In practice, however, a succession of marginal changes to a limited number of policy instruments are implemented, until no further improvement is feasible. I...

A persistent controversy in the economics of higher education is the distributional consequences of tuition-fee subsidies. There are two points at issue. First, subsidies affect income distribution between rich and poor households, analyzed by cross-sectional studies. Second, there may also be...

In dem Maße, in dem die Integration des Europäischen Kapitalmarktes voranschreitet, gewinnt die Harmonisierung der Besteuerung der Zinseinkommen an Bedeutung. Die effiziente Allokation von Kapital darf nicht durch zwischenstaatliche Steuergefälle belastet werden. Nach einer mehr als...

According to a widely held belief, ?all who are able to work, should work?. We consider this statement within a framework of non-linear taxation. The crucial difference between our model and the standard model is that the government can distinguish between productive persons and the disabled. A...