This paper develops a comprehensive framework for analyzing the revenue, efficiency and social welfare implications of top income taxation. It generalizes the Saez (2001) formula for the optimal top tax rate by deriving analytical expressions for the Laffer curve and excess burden. Applied to...

We examine the efficiency gains in health systems generated after the national roll out of basic healthcare in El Salvador between 2010 and 2013. Using data from over 120 million consultations and five million hospitalizations, we demonstrate that the expansion of community health teams,...

This article explores whether altruistic preferences toward households in poor high-temperature countries stimulate global warming policies within rich low-temperature countries that avoids damage from global warming. The article analyzes optimal carbon taxes on commodities within such rich...

Over the last decades, the United States has experienced a large increase in, both, income inequality and living standards. The workhorse models of optimal income taxation call for more redistribution as inequality rises. By contrast, living standards play no role for taxes and transfers in...

The international agreement on a corporate minimum tax is a milestone in global corporate tax arrangements. The minimum tax disturbs the equivalence between otherwise equivalent forms of efficient economic rent taxation: cash-flow tax and allowance for corporate equity. The marginal effective...

This paper develops a mechanism design approach to study externalities and re-distribution. The mechanism screens individuals’ social weights to strike a balance among broad distributional objectives, incentives to work, and incentives to reduce externalities. The welfare-optimal allocation...

This paper characterises optimal taxation when rates of return are affected by effort, ability, and financial advice. When the government observes wealth and capital income, the optimal marginal tax rate on capital income is positive, whereas the rate on wealth is negative in the baseline model....

This paper characterises optimal taxation when rates of return are affected by effort, ability, and financial advice. When the government observes wealth and capital income, the optimal marginal tax rate on capital income is positive, whereas the rate on wealth is negative in the baseline model....

When is a wealth tax preferable to a capital income tax? When is the opposite true? More generally, can capital taxation be structured to improve productivity, incentivize innovation, and ultimately increase welfare? We study these questions theoretically in an infinite-horizon model with...

We study the optimal design of means-tested transfers and progressive income taxes. In a simple analytical model, we demonstrate an optimally negative relation between transfers and income-tax progressivity due to efficiency and redistribution concerns. In a rich dynamic model, we quantify the...