In the last decades all over the world pension policy reforms have tried to account for the changing demographic and socio-economic framework. An excellent starting point for economic analyses of reform strategies is the Mirrlees Review which argues that pension policy should simultaneously address pension benefit design and the taxation of pensions. We focus on old-age pension taxation and add...

This paper aims to provide a perspective on the ideal tax system using insights from optimaltax theory supplemented with empirical evidence. These insights are applied to actual policy questions regarding the progressiveness of the labor income tax, in-work tax credits, the design of the capital income tax, the taxation of housing and pensions, the role of indirect taxes, optimal environmental ...

This paper concerns income taxation, commodity taxation, production taxation and public good provision in a multi-jurisdiction framework with transboundary environmental damage. We assume that each jurisdiction is large in the sense that its government is able to influence the world-market producer price of the externality-generating commodity. The decision-problem facing the government in each...

AIM   Prevention of drinking initiation is a significant challenge in low- and middle-income countries that have a high prevalence of abstainers, including life-time abstainers. This paper aims to encourage a debate on an alternative alcohol taxation approach used currently in Thailand, which aims specifically to prevent drinking initiation in addition to reduce alcohol-attributable harms. ME...

This paper focuses on the derivation of taxation mechanisms for improving system-level behavior in congestion games with unknown price-sensitive users. Here, a taxation mechanism represents a general rule for assigning local taxation functions to edges in a given network, e.g., Pigovian taxes or marginal-cost taxes. Recent results have identified taxation mechanisms that lead to optimal system-...

The paper discusses the implications of optimal tax theory for the debates on uniform commodity taxation and neutral capital income taxation. While strong administrative and political economy arguments in favor of uniform and neutral taxation remain, recent advances in optimal tax theory suggest that the information needed to implement the differentiated taxation prescribed by optimal tax theor...

In their paper, Nikogosian and Kickbusch show how the effects of the adoption by the World Health Organization (WHO) of the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (WHO FCTC) and its first Protocol extend beyond tobacco control and contribute to public health governance more broadly, by revealing new processes, institutions and instruments. While there are certainly good reasons to be optimisti...

We consider the joint effect of profit and Pigouvian taxation in a model of imperfect competition. We show that, when both profit taxation and Pigouvian taxation/subsidy are used, the former is no longer neutral. The two fiscal tools are substitutes, and for any profit taxation rate there exists a unique Pigouvian tax that entails the first best outcome as an equilibrium. Our analysis therefore...