Above the entrance to the headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service on Constitution Avenue is chiseled the quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Taxation is the price we pay for civilization.” It is easy enough to see why state officials would want to put that quotation on display, for it counsels people to be pleased with the taxes they pay. It’s not so easy, though, to determine the accur...

We analyzed the market for indivisible, pure status goods. Firms produce and sell di¤erent brands of pure status goods to a population that is willing to signal individual abilities to potential matches in another population. Individual status is determined by the most expensive status good one has. There is a strati…ed equilibrium with a …nite number of brands. Under constant tax rates, a mono...

This paper analyses the question of the complementarity between income taxation and non linear pricing of public services in a general equilibrium framework with labour heterogeneity. The public service is viewed as a screening device which is supposed to use non linear pricing. In this framework, we show that even in general equilibrium and with labour heterogeneity, it is useful to supplement...

A model of taxation for cooperative n-person games is introduced where proper coalitions are taxed proportionally to their value. Games with non-empty core under taxation at rate e are a-balanced. Sharp bounds on e in matching games on (not necessarily bipartite) graphs are established. Upper and lower bounds on the smallest e in bin packing games are derived and euclidean random TSP games are ...

This paper studies the optimal non linear income tax of couples. We build a general unitary model of labor supply and allow multidimensional heterogeneity in a discrete type framework. We concentrate our analysis on the resulting intra-family labor allocation of labor supplies and show that this analysis is strongly related to the choice of the tax unit (individual versus joint taxation). We gi...

This paper provides a template for the taxation of cigarettes that not only will yield a rich source of government revenue but also has the potential to improve public health. The tax formulae provided here expressly tax the nicotine and tar content of any brand of cigarette. This acts to discourage the substitution of higher nicotine brands for lower nicotine brands when higher cigarette taxat...