The most important drawback of a tax on realized capital gains is its quot;lock-inquot; effect. This paper uses a simple land development model to examine the distortion that the lock-in effect generates. A surprising result is that the lock-in effect does not arise if the basis for the capital...

We generalize the formulae for welfare changes by Arkolakis, Costinot, and Rodríguez-Clare (2012) and Melitz and Redding (2014a) to allow for various cardinalizations of the subutility functions for varieties. Despite the same macro restrictions and the same equilibrium allocations, our new...

The Henry George Theorem (HGT) states that, in first-best economies, the fiscal surplus of a city government that finances the Pigouvian subsidies for agglomeration externalities and the costs of local public goods by a 100% tax on land is zero at optimal city sizes. We extend the HGT to...