Field data obtained from 18 European estuaries using the isotope pairing technique were analyzed for trends in relationship between activity of benthic microalgae and coupled nitrification–denitrification. Kruskal–Wallis tests and analyses of covariance performed on the field dataset showed strong statistical evidence for the hypothesis that sediments colonized by microalgae whose activity exce...

This paper offers a first empirical investigation of how labor taxation (income and payroll taxes) affects individuals' well-being. For identification, we exploit exogenous variation in tax rules over time and across demographic groups using 26 years of German panel data. We find that the tax effect on subjective well-being is significant and positive when controlling for income net of taxes. T...

Optimal Piecewise Linear Income Taxation Given its significance in practice, piecewise linear taxation has received relatively little attention in the literature. This paper offers a simple and transparent analysis of its main characteristics. We fully characterize optimal tax parameters for the cases in which budget sets are convex and nonconvex respectively. A numerical analysis of a discrete...

Optimal Taxation with Capital Accumulation and Wage Bargaining This study examines optimal taxation in a unionized economy in which households save capital. The main findings are as follows. Judd’s (1985) and Chamley’s (1986) classical results of zero taxation on capital income holds. This is true independently of workers’ savings behaviour or the capitalists’ weight in the social welfare funct...

Competition among regional governments may lead to suboptimal levels of capital taxation, as governments ignore the external benefits of capital flight to other regions. However, there have been few attempts to quantify the magnitude of the resulting efficiency losses. This paper presents extensive calculations of the efficiency costs over a wide range of parameter scenarios and assumptions abo...

Imperfect altruism between generations may lead to insufficient capital accumulation. We study the welfare consequences of taxing the rent on a fixed production factor, such as land, in combination with age-dependent redistributions as a remedy. Taxing rent enhances welfare by increasing capital investment. This holds for any tax rate and recycling of the tax revenues except for combinations of...

In this paper we prove that a graduated minimum wage rate can provide a Pareto improvement of an optimal allocation with nonlinear taxation. The reason is that a graduated minimum wage rate makes it harder for the more productive workers to mimic the income of the less productive workers. We also show that in a utilitarian social welfare optimum, the graduated minimum wage rate increases the co...

Random taxation may be optimal when the tax payers differ in their attitudes towards risk, so that tax randomization enables the government to separate agents who otherwise would have been pooled. The paper provides conditions under which randomization is optimal, both characterizing circumstances where local random deviations are improving in a neighborhood of a non random optimum, and giving ...

We study a dynamic regulation model where firms’ actions contribute to a stock externality. The regulator and firms have asymmetric information about serially correlated abatement costs. With price-based policies such as taxes, or if firms trade quotas efficiently, the regulator learns about the evolution of both stock and costs. This ability to learn about costs is important in determining the...

We study the role of anonymous markets in which trades cannot be monitored by the government. We adopt a Mirrlees approach to analyze economies in which agents have private information and a benevolent government controls optimal redistributive tax policy. While unrestricted access to anonymous markets reduces the set of policy instruments available to the government, it also limits the scope o...