Food taxes increase prices of food or food ingredients in order to stimulate consumers to change their eating behaviour and finally to level up population health. Their aim is to tackle the high rates of obesity and other lifestyle diseases. As Bonnet argues, often food taxes are set up out of an economic perspective (1). To change consumer behaviour is one thing, to level up people’s health is...

We study the dynamics of the distribution of wealth in an Overlapping Generation economy with bequest and various forms of redistributive taxation. We characterize the transitional dynamics of the wealth distribution and as well as the stationary distribution. We show that the stationary wealth distribution is a Pareto distribution. Wealth is less concentrated (the Gini coefficient is lower) fo...

Common government policy towards curbing unhealthy alcohol drinking behavior is to raise taxes thereby lowering consumption. This study examines how alcohol excise taxes (beer, spirits and wine) affect the number of individuals being treated for alcoholism in state facilities as well as effects on consumption on the state and regional levels in the United States. State-level data for the 50 sta...

OBJECTIVES We examined news coverage of public debates about large taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) to illuminate how the news media frames the debate and to inform future efforts to promote obesity-related public policy. METHODS We conducted a quantitative content analysis in which we assessed how frequently 30 arguments supporting or opposing SSB taxes appeared in national news med...

To finance expenditures on goods and services and government programs, governments levy taxes on many different economic activities. Large countries tend to raise much of their revenue by taxing income. For example, in the United States, taxes are levied on capital income, such as profits and interest, and also on labor income, such as wages and salaries. Taxes on income affect economic activit...

We compare taxes and quotas where a regulator and a non-strategic firm have asymmetric information about a pollution-producing activity. In previous studies, optimal quotas are generally assumed to bind with probability one. We analyze the conditions under which a quota that binds with probability less than one is optimal. A quota that may be slack can be targeted towards some firms whilst allo...

This paper studies the effects of a tax on energy use in a growth model where market structure is endogenous and jointly determined with the rate of technological change. Because this economy does not exhibit the scale effect (a positive relation between TFP growth and aggregate R&D), the tax has no effect on the steady-state growth rate. It has, however, important transitional effects that giv...