BACKGROUND Childhood obesity is a recognised public health problem and around 25% of Australian children are overweight or obese. A major contributor is the obesogenic environment which encourages over consumption of energy dense nutrient poor food. Taxation is commonly proposed as a mechanism to reduce consumption of poor food choices and hence reduce rates of obesity and overweight in the com...

The size of government consumption relative to gross national product (GNP) has grown steadily in Europe and North America over most of the post-World War II period. In real terms, government expenditure in the United States has grown at nearly 4 percent annually over the last four and a half decades. As a percentage of GNP. it rose from approximately 13.7 percent in 1946 to 22.1 percent in 198...

We set up an OLG-model, where households choose human capital investment and decide on investing their endogenous savings in a portfolio of riskless and risky assets. Thereby, the households are exposed to both aggregate wage and capital risks due to technological shocks. We derive the optimal public policy mix of taxation and education policy and show that risks can be optimally diversified on...

I undertake a quantitative investigation into the short run effects of changes in the timing of taxes for model economies in which heterogeneous households face a borrowing constraint. A combination of the distortionary effects of non-lump-sum taxation and the liquidity effects arising from the asset market structure are found to imply large real effects from tax changes. For example, a tempora...

The implications for taxation theory of a life-cycle model of consumption incorporating financial transactions costs are derived. The equity case for progressive taxation is shown to correspond, in a life-cycle setting, to an efficiency case. Individuals prefer a progressive tax system to a proportional one because the tax burden is lower when they are young and face high transactions costs of ...

This paper considers the optimal taxation of savings intermediation and payment services in a dynamic general equilibrium setting, when the government can also use consumption and income taxes. When payment services are used in strict proportion to ...nal consumption, and the cost of intermediation services is ...xed and the same across ...rms, the optimal taxes are generally indeterminate. But...

This paper examines linear income taxation in a model where preferences over relative consumption are only exhibited by some individuals in the population. This heterogeneity in preferences generates several interesting issues in the optimal tax context. We analyze cases where the tax authority (1) uses a non-welfarist objective (one which places variable weight on the welfare of relatively-con...

The Australian Government's "alcopops" tax legislation will soon be voted on by the Senate. This is the first time in memory that an alcohol taxation measure has been informed principally by public health concerns. Much debate surrounds the utility of alcohol taxation as a measure to reduce alcohol-related harm. However, the harms resulting from alcohol misuse in Australia are at unacceptable l...

We study the effects of taxation in a model with a representative agent with time-inconsistent preferences: discounting is quasi-geometric. Utility is derived from consumption and leisure, and taxation can be based on consumption and investment spending as well as on capital and labor income. The model allows for closed-form solutions, and welfare comparisons can be made across different taxati...