This paper concerns redistribution and provision of public goods in an economic federation with two levels of government: a local government in each locality and a central government for the economic federation as a whole. We assume that each locality is characterized by two ability-types (high...

This paper addresses transboundary environmental problems in the context of an optimal tax problem, when part of the labor force is mobile across countries. The policy instruments include both commodity taxation and nonlinear income taxation. We show how the tax policy in a noncooperative...

This paper addresses optimal taxation, when the relationship between consumption and environmental damage is uncertain and treated as a random variable by policy makers. The main purpose is to analyze how additional uncertainty about this relationship affects the optimal unit tax on the...

This paper evaluates the tax reforms carried out in Sweden between 1980 and 1991. We use a recently developed nonparametric labor supply function to account for the behavorial responses of the taxed individuals. We decompose the tax reform to study how the separate components influence hours of...

When a public good is excludable it is possible to charge individuals for using the good. We study the role of prices on excludable public goods within an extension of the Stern-Stiglitz version of the Mirrlees optimal income tax model. Our discussion includes both the case where the public good...

This paper studies a very pure form of "vote purchasing". We consider whether it may be in the interest of a party to discriminate between groups that, possibly except for size, are identical in all welfare relevant spects, i.e. the groups are assumed to have the same income, needs, etc. To...

A large share of public funds is spent on private goods (education, health care, day care, etc.). This paper integrates two different approaches to the analysis of public provision of private goods. While normative public economics has established an efficiency case for such provision, the...

The basic idea in this paper is that labor supply can be viewed as a function of the entire budget set, so that one way to account non-parametrically for a nonlinear budget set is to estimate a nonparametric regression where the variable in the regression is the budget set. In the special case...

Saez (2010) introduced an influential estimator that has become known as the bunching estimator. Using this method one can get an estimate of the taxable income elasticity from the bunching pattern around a kink point. The bunching estimator has become popular, with a large number of papers...

In this paper, we consider how the hours of work and retirement age ought to respond to a change in the uncertainty of the length of life. In a first best framework, where a benevolent government exercises perfect control over the individuals’ labor supply and retirement-decisions, the results...