Taxation is a key activity of any state and a constant point of political struggle. The structure of taxation is continuously changing and evolving, and its size has grown dramatically during the last two hundred years. Many of the cross-national patterns we observe today are the result of centuries old conflicts and challenges, hence we need to take history into account if we want to understan...

Progressive Taxation in a Tournament Economy Not enough is known about the responsiveness of individuals, in particular those who tend to work under different incentives, to changes in marginal tax rates. We ask whether changes in marginal tax rates are less distortionary for workers engaged in a contest. To examine this potential rationale for a more progressive tax code, we first model the ef...

This paper considers an economy with a public good where a decision must be made both about the level of the public good and the taxation imposed on each citizen (multi-dimensional policy space). In this context, we derive two results: i) we show that a Nash equilibrium exists under deterministic voting, ii) we show that political competition is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the ...

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

We consider a Mirrleesian model of optimal income taxation with endogenous product prices. Given endogenous prices, any redistribution of income in the economy affects social welfare not only directly, but also through its influence on the level of product prices. To correct for this price externality, the optimal income tax schedule includes a new Pigouvian term. For competitive markets with i...

We study how taxation influences labour supply using a specifically designed representative survey of the German population. First, we investigate whether taxes generally matter for the labour supply decisions of our respondents. Around 41 per cent report taking taxes into consideration, implying that the majority of the German population is unresponsive to taxation. Second, we look at self-rep...

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 extend the discussion of redistributive politics across electoral systems to allow for taxation to be distortionary. We allow politicians to choose any tax rate between zero and unity and then redistribute the money collected. We build on the model put forward by Myerson (1993) and Lizzeri and Persico (2001 and 2005) to show that the use of distortionnary taxation can be understood as an ana...

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...

This paper examines monetary and fiscal policy through the estimation of a New-Keynesian dynamic general equilibrium model for Iran’s economy. In this New-Keynesian dynamic general equilibrium model, the consumers encounter the liquidity constraint and the firms face sticky prices, while they are changing them. In the model presented, a role is considered for both government spending and taxati...