A common objection to “sin taxes”—corrective taxes on goods that are thought to be overconsumed, such as cigarettes, alcohol, and sugary drinks—is that they often fall disproportionately on low-income consumers. This paper studies the interaction between corrective and redistributive...

In 2012 the state of Washington created a legal framework for production and retail sales of marijuana. Ten other U.S. states and Canada have followed. These states hope to generate tax revenue for their state budgets while limiting harms associated with marijuana sales and consumption. We use a...

This paper studies the design of sin taxes when firms exercise market power. We outline an optimal tax framework that highlights how market power impacts the efficiency and redistributive properties of sin taxation, and quantify these effects in an application to sugar-sweetened beverage...

A common objection to "sin taxes"--corrective taxes on goods that are thought to be overconsumed, such as cigarettes, alcohol, and sugary drinks--is that they often fall disproportionately on low-income consumers. This paper studies the interaction between corrective and redistributive motives...

We show how corrective taxation can improve the efficiency properties of tradable quotas systems affected by market power. Indeed, when only a subset of firms are price takers while the remaining firms enjoy market power, we show that, if the regulator sets an ad hoc taxation on firms' traded...

Commodity taxes have three distinct roles: (1) revenue collection, (2) interpersonal redistribution, and (3) resource allocation. The paper presents an integrated treatment of these three concerns in a second-best general equilibrium framework, which leads to the 'generalised Ramsey rule' for...

We study the aggregate and distributional effects of corporate tax reforms when market power is heterogeneous across sectors and firms. We use a life-cycle model with incomplete markets in which capital and equity do not always move in tandem when corporate tax policy changes. On the one hand,...