This paper, prepared for the Handbook of Income Distribution (edited by A.B. Atkinson and F. Bourguignon), reviews some of the central issues that arise in thinking about the motives for, politics of, constraints on and measurement of, redistribution. Amongst the themes are: the potential...

With quasi-linear in leisure preferences, closed-form solutions for the marginal tax rates and the marginal utility of consumption under utilitarian and maxi-min objectives depend only on the skill distribution. Bunching induced by binding second-order incentive conditions also depends only on...

Regions inhabited with an immobile population of disabled and able individuals compete to attract mobile firms that provide jobs. The redistributive goal of regional governments is to support the disabled, who cannot work. Able individuals may work, be involuntary unemployed because of frictions...

This paper studies optimal linear income taxation and redistributive social insurance when the former has the traditional labor distortion and the latter generates both ex ante and ex post moral hazard. Private insurance is available and individuals differ in labor productivity and in loss...

The Atkinson-Stiglitz Theorem states that if labor is weakly separable from goods in household utility functions, differential commodity taxation should not be not part of an optimal redistributive tax system. This Theorem, which is arguable the most policy-relevant result to come out of the...

The Canadian system of equalization is designed to address differences in revenue-raising capacity across provinces, basing entitlements on actual provincial tax rates and bases. However, since it does so on a year-on-year basis, the standard against which a given province's equalization...

The Canadian system of equalization is designed to address differences in revenue-raising capacity across provinces, basing a province's entitlements on its actual tax bases. However, since it does so on a year-on-year basis, the standard against which a given province's equalization...

This paper presents a selective and non-technical survey of the role of intergovernmental equalization transfers as a device for achieving efficiency in the allocation of labor across regions in a decentralized nation, and for achieving fiscal equity among residents of various regions. We...

We study the efficiency of credit market equilibria when financial intermediaries cannot observe the riskiness or the returns of potential investment projects. With loan financing, there is over-investment in high-return, high-risk projects and under-investment in low-return, low-risk projects...

This paper studies multi-stage processes of non-cooperative voluntary provision of public goods. In the first stage, one or more players announce contributions that may be conditional on the subsequent contributions of others. In later stages, players choose their own contributions and fulfill...