Pre-tax car prices are particularly low in EU countries with high registration taxes but no car production, meaning that the tax is equivalent to an import tariff and induces international price discrimination. The paper develops a theorectical model to analyse the European Commission's policy of facilitating arbitrage and thereby reducing car price differences. The effects on prices, quantitie...

This paper considers a Ramsey model of linear capital and labor income taxation in which the government cannot commit ex-ante to a sequence of policies for the future. In this setup, if the government is more impatient than the government, the capital income tax will always be positive in steady state. Thus, impatience and lack of commitment are able to generate positive capital taxes in the lo...

This paper studies the optimal direct/indirect tax mix problem when individuals differ in several unobservable characteristics (productivity and endowments). It presents general expressions for the optimal commodity tax rates and proves that contrary to Atkinson and Stiglitz’s (1976) result, differential commodity taxation remains a useful instrument of tax policy even if preferences are separa...

This paper considers education investment and public education policy in closed and open economies with an extortionary government. The extortionary government in a closed economy chooses an education policy in order to overcome a hold-up problem of time-consistent taxation similar to benevolent governments. The two types of government differ in their education policies if highly productive lab...

In this paper, we analyze the use of fiscal and monetary instruments to improve long-run welfare when productive investment is irreversible and uncollateralizable and there is no insurance. Only fiat money or government-issued bonds provide self-insurance. We demonstrate that an increase in precautionary savings reduces irreversible productive investment. Hence, subsidies to promote productive ...

Federal structures create the possibility of vertical tax externalities between levels of government, with the private sector’s response to the tax policy decisions of one level affecting the tax base of the other. Such effects arise most obviously when both levels of government co-occupy the same tax base. This paper reviews and extends recent results on the implications of such externalities ...

This paper studies how the level of the public good and the amounts of taxes are determined in a bargaining model. Using the Nash bargaining solution as the solution concept, the paper shows that the nature of individuals’ preferences over the public good and private good determines the nature of the tax regime. In particular, the paper characterizes conditions on preferences under which the Na...

Imperfect information and inattention to energy costs are important potential motivations for energy efficiency standards and subsidies. We evaluate these motivations in the lightbulb market using a theoretical model and two randomized experiments. We derive welfare effects as functions of reduced-form sufficient statistics capturing economic and psychological parameters, which we estimate usin...

This paper examines the role of work as an incentive device in income maintenance programs in different informational environments. To that end, we make both the income generating ability and the disutility of labor of individuals unobservable, and compare the resulting benefit schedules with those of programs found in the United States since Welfare Reform (1996). We find that work requirement...