In this paper we argue that government's allocation of resources among competing age groups has significant bearing on labor and capital supply and optimal tax policies. Empirics reveal that allocation of public expenditure is highly favorable to the old cohorts in developed countries. However,...

What is the prescription of Ramsey capital taxation in the long run? Aiyagari (1995) addressed the question in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets (HAIM) economy, showing that a positive capital tax should be imposed to implement the so-called modified golden rule (MGR). This paper revisits...

What is the prescription of Ramsey capital taxation in the long run? Aiyagari (1995) addressed the question in a heterogeneous-agent incomplete-markets (HAIM) economy, showing that a positive capital tax should be imposed to implement the so-called modified golden rule (MGR). This paper revisits...

We design an infinite-horizon heterogeneous-agents and incomplete-markets model to demonstrate analytically that in the absence of any redistributional effects of government policies, optimal capital tax is zero despite capital overaccumulation under precautionary savings and borrowing...

There are multiple reasons to motivate the role of capital taxation in the heterogenous-agent incomplete-markets (HAIM) model. One is the production inefficiency caused by precautionary savings. The other is the wealth redistribution role played by capital taxation. To distinguish between these...

We examine the optimal taxation of capital in a Ramsey setting of a general-equilibrium heterogeneous-agent economy with uninsurable idiosyncratic investment or capital-income risk. We prove that the ex ante optimal tax, evaluated at steady state, maximizes human wealth, namely the present...

With capital‐skill complementarity, the secular decline in the price of capital equipment due to equipment‐specific technological progress (ESTP) keeps pushing up the demand for skilled relative to unskilled labor and raising the skill premium. This paper quantitatively characterizes the...

We analyze the implications of the decline in labor’s share in national income for optimal Ramsey taxation. It is optimal to accompany the decline in labor share by raising capital taxes only if the labor share is falling because of a decline in competition or other mechanisms that raise the...

This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth in Poland and four types of taxes and human capital investment. We primarily rely on an exogenous growth model that merges the Mankiw-Romer-Weil model, augmented with learning-by-doing and spillover-effects, with selected elements...

Previous literature demonstrates that in a computational life cycle model the optimal tax on capital is positive and large. Given the computational complexities of these overlapping generations models it is helpful to determine the relative importance of the economic factors driving this result....