Monitoring the job-search activities of unemployed workers is a common government intervention. Typically, a caseworker reviews the unemployed worker's employment contacts at some frequency, and applies sanctions if certain requirements are not met. I model monitoring in the optimal unemployment...

Taxable (and broad) income elasticities are estimated using tax return data from 1979 to 2001. Data from the Continuous Work History Survey (CWHS) yield an estimated taxable income elasticity for the 1990s that is about half the corresponding 1980s estimate. Estimates from the full Statistics of...

Optimal tax theory has difficulty rationalizing high marginal tax rates at the upper end of the income distribution. In this paper, I construct a model of optimal income taxation in which agents' preferences are interdependent. I derive a simple expression for optimal taxes that accommodates...

The paper studies the optimal income taxation with a finite number of types. It is shown that Rawlsian social welfare and maximax social welfare functions constitute upper and lower bounds for the second-best optimal marginal tax schedules. Therefore any marginal tax schedule with a higher tax...

Simplicity is an important attribute for a tax system and there have been many attempts at simplification in different countries including, of course, Australia. However these attempts have not been very successful. The main reason is that there are, of course, important factors that cause tax...

We apply the Parry-Small (2005) framework to asses whether the level taxation of motor fuel is broadly appropriate in a group of countries (OECD, BRICs and South Africa) accounting for more than 80 percent of world greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper deals with emissions from oil...

Brazilian economy has experienced a major boost in leverage in the first decade of 2000 as a result of a set factors ranging from macroeconomic stability to the abundant liquidity in international financial markets before 2008 and a set of deliberate decisions taken by President Lula's to expand...

We apply the Parry-Small (2005) framework to asses whether the level taxation of motor fuel is broadly appropriate in a group of countries (OECD, BRICs and South Africa) accounting for more than 80 percent of world greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. This paper deals with emissions from oil...

This paper incorporates a distortionary tax into the microfoundations of money framework and revisits the optimum quantity of money. An optimal policy may consist of both a positive tax rate and a positive nominal interest rate: if the buyer’s surplus share is inefficiently small, the...