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...

We consider the optimal nonlinear income taxation problem in a dynamic, stochastic environment when the government cannot change the tax rule as uncertainty resolves. Due to such a stationarity constraint, our taxation problem is reduced to a static one over an expanded type space. We strengthen the argument in the static model that the zero topmarginal tax rate result is of little practical im...

Tax rates have fluctuated considerably since federal income taxes were introduced in the U.S. in 1913. This paper analyzes the effects of stochastic taxation on asset prices in a dynamic general equilibrium model. Stochastic taxation affects the after-tax returns of both risky and safe assets. Whenever taxes change, bond and equity prices adjust to clear the asset markets. These price adjustmen...

Happy Taxpayers? Income Taxation and Well-Being 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 posi...

We examine the proposal by Peter Zweifel and Michael Breuer to combine risk-based premiums with a subsidy for individuals whose expenditure for health insurance exceeds a certain share of income. Assuming a maximin social welfare function and optimal linear income taxation, we find that this proposal is superior to social insurance if the correlation between productivity and health is not too l...

Existing studies of fiscal policy interactions are based on single equation models of either taxation or expenditures, without specifying the underlying social welfare function, without taking account of budget constraints and without allowing for cost differences between jurisdictions. Taking all this into account, we derive an extended version of the linear expenditure system (LES) with polic...

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...

The impact of fiscal activity on human capital formation has often been analyzed with regard to the expenditure side of the budget, i.e. the subsidization of (higher) education. Recent contributions have increasingly focused on the effect of taxation on human capital accumulation. Less attention is given to the simultaneous effect of both subsidization and taxation on human capital accumulation...

Social optimization problems maximize the weighted sum of individual utilities over feasible allocations that satisfy certain constraints. In this paper, we propose a method that determines endogenous individual weights for such problems. We …rst provide three axioms which uniquely determine, for any welfare function, the contribution of a bundle of goods to that welfare function. We then de…ne...