The purpose of this paper is to introduce and adopt a generalised version of Roemer's (1998) Equality of Opportunity (EOp) framework, which we call extended EOp, for analysing second-best optimal income taxation. Unlike the pure EOp criterion of Roemer (1998) the extended EOp criterion allows...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to land redistribution policy which is presently not only one of the most defining political and development issues, but also perhaps the most difficult in South Africa. Design/methodology/approach – The paper develops a programming model...

In this paper we explore tax revenue in a regime of widespread corruption in a static and dynamic framework. We prove that the relationship between tax rate and tax collection is not linear. In astatic context, this may bring about a Laffer-like behavior of overall tax revenue. A higher tax...

The financing of higher education through public spending imposes a transfer of resources from taxpayers to university students and their parents. We provide an explanation for this phenomenon. Those who attend higher education will earn more income in the future and will pay more taxes. People...

Actual tax systems do not follow the normative recommendations of yhe theory of optimal taxation. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the informational difficulties of knowing or estimating all relevant elasticities and parameters. Secondly, the political complexities that would arise if a...

In this paper we follow the tradition of applied general equilibrium modelling of the Walrasian static variety to study the empirical viability of a double dividend (green, welfare, and employment) in the Spanish economy. We consider a counterfactual scenario in which an ecotax is levied on the...

A signalling model is developed to investigate the consequences of corporate income taxation in the presence of adverse selection in the equity market. The model obtains a unique, informationally-constrained efficient equilibrium in which a better quality firm retains more inside-equity, and, as...

We examine whether minimum wages can fulfill a useful role as part of an optimal non-linear income tax scheme. In this setting, governments cannot observe household abilities, only their incomes. Redistributing according to income, the government is constrained by a set of incentive constraints....

Redistribution programs are constrained because those not working may be either unable to work, voluntarily unemployed or involuntarily unemployed. The inability to distinguish among these theree cases inhibits the targeting of transfers to those most in need. Enabling the government to monitor...