This paper deals with the consequences of the assumption of negatively interdependent preferences for the shape of the optimal nonlinear income tax and the effcient level of public good provision in a setting where the policy maker maximizes an inequality averse social welfare function and the...

The paper extends Ng's (1987) model of optimal taxation of diamond goods - goods that are valued solely for their costliness. We extend his findings by analyzing how other goods should be taxed in the presence of pure diamond goods; modified Ramsey rules are derived in a basic single-type model...

Financial intermediation and bank spreads are important elements in the analysis of business cycle transmission and monetary policy. We present a simple framework that introduces lending relationships, a relevant feature of financial intermediation that has been so far neglected in the monetary...

The incidence and efficiency losses of taxes have usually been analyzed in isolation from public expenditures. This negligence of the expenditure side may imply a serious misperception of the effects of marginal tax rates. The reason is that part of the marginal tax may in fact be a payment for...

We show that a so-called expectations-based optimal monetary policy rule has desirable properties in a standard New Keynesian model augmented with a cost channel and inflation rate expectations that are partly backward-looking. In particular, optimal monetary policy under commitment is...

Staggered prices are a fundamental building block of New Keynesian dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. In the standard model, prices are uniformly staggered but recent empirical evidence suggest that deviations from uniform staggering are common, This paper analyzes how...

This paper analyzes the role of product quality and labor efficiency in shaping the trade patterns and trade intensities within and across two groups of countries, the developed and richer North and the developing South. Taking prices as a proxy for quality, recent empirical literature...