A common claim in the policy discourse is that a government wishing to achieve equality of opportunity should use public provision education for equalisation opportunities rather than income taxation, which only equalizes incomes. We develop framework tax and rules welfarist non-welfarist/equality cases can be transparently compared. show addition policies, progressive taxation also plays role ...

This paper studies the repayment of regional debt in a multi-region economy with a central authority: who pays the obligation issued by a region? With commitment, a central government will use its taxation power to smooth distortionary taxes across regions. Absent commitment, the central government may be induced to bailout the regional government in order to smooth consumption and distortionar...

The latest version of Schumpeterian growth theory eliminates the scale effect by positing a process of development of new product lines that fragments the aggregate market in submarkets whose size does not increase with population. A key feature of this process is the sterilization of the effect of the size of the aggregate market on firms’ incentives to invest in the growth of a given product ...

This paper develops a tractable method for resolving the equity-efficiency tradeoff that modifies the Kaldor-Hicks compensation principle to account for the distortionary cost of redistribution. Weighting measures of individual surplus by the inequality deflator corresponds to searching for local Pareto improvements by making transfers through the income tax schedule. Empirical evidence consist...

In many search models of the labor market, unemployment insurance (UI) is conveniently interpreted as the value of leisure or home production and is, therefore, treated as a parameter. However, in reality, UI has to be funded through taxation that might be distortionary. In this paper, I analyze the welfare implications of raising funds towards UI benefits through different taxation systems wit...

Schoefer, Benjamin—Regulation and taxation: A complementarity I show how quantity regulation can lower elasticities and thereby increase optimal tax rates. Such regulation imposes regulatory incentives for particular choice quantities. Their strength varies between zero (laissez faire) and infinite (command economy). In the latter case, regulation effectively eliminates any intensive behavioral...

According to the existing literature, capital taxes should not be imposed in the presence of optimal profit taxation in either unionised or competitive labour markets. We show that this conclusion does not hold for an economy with dual labour markets, where the competitive wage rate provides the outside option for unionised workers. Even with non-distortionary profit taxation it is optimal for ...

There is a substantial empirical literature quantifying the positive relationship between city size and productivity. The paper draws out the implications of this productivity relationship for evaluations of urban transport improvements. A theoretical model is developed and used to derive a wider cost-benefit measure that includes productivity effects. The order of magnitude of such effects is ...