When accidental bequests signal otherwise unobservable individual characteristics such as productivity and longevity, the tax administration should partition the population into two groups: One consisting of people who do not receive an inheritance and the other of those who do. The first tagged...

This article models a two-period overlapping generations economy in the steady state where the realization of the quantity/quality number of children depends on an initial investment in children and on a random shock. It shows that the implementation of the first-best allocation, in which the...

The Ramsey tax problem examines the design of linear commodity taxes to collect a given tax revenue. This approach has been seriously challenged by Atkinson and Stiglitz (1976) who show that (under some conditions) an optimal income tax makes commodity taxes redundant. In the meantime, the...