We study the implications of limited commitment on education and tax policies chosen by benevolent governments. Individual wages are determined by both innate abilities and education levels. Consistent with real world practices, the government can decide to subsidize different levels of...

We study Pareto optimal tax and education policies when human capital upon labor market entry is endogenous and individuals face wage uncertainty. Though optimal labor distortions are history-dependent, i.e. depend on income and education, simple policy instruments can yield the desired...

We study optimal tax and educational policies in a dynamic private information economy, in which ex-ante heterogeneous individuals make an educational investment early in their life and face a stochastic wage distribution. We characterize labor and education wedges in this setting analytically...

We study education and income tax policies in a model with endogenous selection into college. Our framework is strongly influenced by the empirical college literature and incorporates heterogenous returns and tastes for college, earnings risk (implying uncertain returns to college) and...

We study optimal tax and educational policies in a dynamic private information economy, in which ex-ante heterogeneous individuals make an educational investment early in their life and face a stochastic wage distribution. We characterize labor and education wedges in this setting analytically...

We study optimal nonlinear taxation of labor income and linear taxation of capital income in a life-cycle framework with private information and idiosyncratic risk. We focus on simple history-independent tax instruments. We first analyze the welfare losses from this simplification as compared to...

We analyze optimal taxation of labor and capital income in a life-cycle framework with idiosyncratic income risk. We provide a novel decomposition of labor income tax formulas into a redistribution and an insurance component. The latter is independent of the social welfare function and...

The total social benefits of college education exceed the private benefits because the government receives a share of the monetary returns in the form of income taxes. We study the policy implications of this fiscal externality in an optimal dynamic tax framework. Using a variational approach we...

We analyze optimal taxation of labor and capital income in a life-cycle framework with idiosyncratic income risk. We provide a novel decomposition of labor income tax formulas into a redistribution and an insurance component. The latter is independent of the social welfare function and...

The total social benefits of college education exceed the private benefits because the government receives a share of the monetary returns in the form of income taxes. We study the policy implications of this fiscal externality in an optimal dynamic tax framework. Using a variational approach we...