We examine preferences for redistribution inherent in Swedish tax policy during 1971–2012 using the inverse optimal tax approach. The income distribution is carefully characterized with the help of administrative register data, and we employ behavioral elasticities reflecting the perceived distortionary effects of taxation. The revealed social welfare weights are high for non-workers, small for...

We develop an endogenous growth model driven by externalities from both private and public capital. The government levies distortionary taxation to finance a publicly provided consumption good and public infrastructure. Firms face adjustment costs. We compare the optimal and time-consistent policies in a linearquadratic approximation of the model. Although the time-consistent equilibrium is sub...

The Taxation of Couples This paper is concerned with the question of how couples should be taxed. One reason for the importance of this issue is simply that the overwhelming majority of individuals live in households formed around couples, and so it could be argued that empirically, this is the single most important problem in personal income taxation. A second reason is that the economic theor...

there is always a considerable difference between the corporate performance and the tax levy that is identified by the taxation authorities which has become a common practice. this fact has led to no fairness among taxpayers, a fact that influences the horizontal and vertical sides of equity. horizontal equity is created when people feel the benefits of the tax gain that is proportional to the ...

We consider the joint effect of profit and Pigouvian taxation in a model of imperfect competition. We show that, when both profit taxation and Pigouvian taxation/subsidy are used, the former is no longer neutral. The two fiscal tools are substitutes, and for any profit taxation rate there exists a unique Pigouvian tax that entails the first best outcome as an equilibrium. Our analysis therefore...

This paper introduces habit-forming preferences in a Barro-type endogenous growth model with productive public services. Government expenditure, which may be subject to congestion, is financed by distortionary income taxation. Different from the standard time-separable model, the presence of habits makes the economy feature transitional dynamics, which are solved in closed form. Setting the inc...

We reconsider the role of an inflation conservative central banker in a setting with distortionary taxation. To do so, we assume monetary and fiscal policy are decided by independent authorities that do not abide to past commitments. If the two authorities make policy decisions simultaneously, inflation conservatism causes fiscal overspending. But if fiscal policy is determined before monetary ...

We study the the emergence of multiple equilibria in models with capital and bonds under various monetary and …scal policies. We show that the presence of capital is indeed another independent source of local and global multiplicites, even under active policies that yield local determinacy. We also show how a very similar mechanism generates multiplicities in models with bonds and distortionary...