Kautilya on Public Goods and Taxation

Public goods provision and redistributive taxation ¬リニ

This paper studies the relationship between redistributive taxation and tax-deductible charitable contributions. Redistribution has two opposite effects on voluntary giving. The price of charitable giving decreases with the degree of redistribution, and this has a positive effect on the total amount of giving (substitution effect). However, redistribution leads to lower consumption for the cont...

Democracy, redistributive taxation and the private provision of public goods

Article history: Received 16 October 2009 Received in revised form 6 June 2010 Accepted 11 June 2010 Available online 19 June 2010 The paper studies in a simple, Downsian model of political competition the private provision of public goods embedded in a system of democracy and redistributive taxation. Results show that the positive effect of inequality on production of public goods, to which Ol...

Optimal Income Taxation, Public Goods Provision and Robust Mechanism Design

This paper extends the model of optimal income taxation due to Mirrlees (1971) and includes private information on public goods preferences. A mechanism design approach is used to establish the following result: If policies are required to be robustly implementable in the sense of Bergemann and Morris (2005), then the optimality conditions in the extended model with uncertainty about tax and ex...

Public goods provision, redistributive taxation, and wealth accumulation ¬リニ

A Note on the Optimal Supply of Public Goods and the Distortionary Cost of Taxation

In a recent article, I demonstrated that, under standard simplifying assumptions, it is possible to finance a public good in a manner such that a Pareto improvement results whenever the simple cost-benefit test is satisfied -that is, without any adjustment for the “marginal cost of funds.” In particular, the method of finance involves adjusting the income tax so that the combined incidence of t...