We analyze optimal pension systems relying on simple policy instruments in a lifecycle environment which admits endogenous decisions of how much to work as well as when to retire. The optimality in this context means the highest welfare that can be achieved within a restricted set of...

We examine a prominent justification for capital income taxation: goods preferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. In an environment where commodity taxes are allowed to be nonlinear functions of income and consumption, we derive an analytical expression that reveals the forces...

We study optimal labor and savings distortions in a lifecycle model with idiosyncratic shocks. We show a tight connection between its recursive formulation and a static Mirrlees model with two goods, which allows us to derive elasticity-based expressions for the dynamic optimal distortions. We...