Welfare programs including disability benefits have been considered as an efficient way of delivering transfers to the needy. This paper addresses the importance of administrative cost of welfare systems by focusing on an agency problem arising between the government and social workers, whose...

An optimal commodity tax approach is taken to compare trade taxes and VATs when some commodities are produced informally. Trade taxes apply to all imports and exports, including intermediate goods, while the VAT applies only to sales by the formal sector and imports. The VAT achieves production...

There is a growing body of literature on the commitment problem of interregional transfers. The problem occurs because of an ex post bailout by a central government leading to ex ante adverse incentive consequences for a local government. However, different models have yielded different economic...

Actual inheritances are an hybrid of canonical types of bequests and in particular of accidental bequests and altruistic bequests. In this paper, bequeathed estate consists of two components: an amount intended by altruistic parents and an amount which results from the "premature" death of...

The literatures on differential commodity taxes and on quantity controls to supplement income taxation have developed separately. This paper combines these two strands in the standard framework of optimal nonlinear income taxation. The authors use a model with two types of households where the...