The New Dynamic Public Finance


Book Description

Optimal tax design attempts to resolve a well-known trade-off: namely, that high taxes are bad insofar as they discourage people from working, but good to the degree that, by redistributing wealth, they help insure people against productivity shocks. Until recently, however, economic research on this question either ignored people's uncertainty about their future productivities or imposed strong and unrealistic functional form restrictions on taxes. In response to these problems, the new dynamic public finance was developed to study the design of optimal taxes given only minimal restrictions on the set of possible tax instruments, and on the nature of shocks affecting people in the economy. In this book, Narayana Kocherlakota surveys and discusses this exciting new approach to public finance. An important book for advanced PhD courses in public finance and macroeconomics, The New Dynamic Public Finance provides a formal connection between the problem of dynamic optimal taxation and dynamic principal-agent contracting theory. This connection means that the properties of solutions to principal-agent problems can be used to determine the properties of optimal tax systems. The book shows that such optimal tax systems necessarily involve asset income taxes, which may depend in sophisticated ways on current and past labor incomes. It also addresses the implications of this new approach for qualitative properties of optimal monetary policy, optimal government debt policy, and optimal bequest taxes. In addition, the book describes computational methods for approximate calculation of optimal taxes, and discusses possible paths for future research.







Handbook of Public Economics


Book Description

The Field of Public Economics has been changing rapidly in recent years, and the sixteen chapters contained in this Handbook survey many of the new developments. As a field, Public Economics is defined by its objectives rather than its techniques and much of what is new is the application of modern methods of economic theory and econometrics to problems that have been addressed by economists for over two hundred years. More generally, the discussion of public finance issues also involves elements of political science, finance and philosophy. These connections are evidence in several of the chapters that follow. Public Economics is the positive and normative study of government's effect on the economy. We attempt to explain why government behaves as it does, how its behavior influences the behavior of private firms and households, and what the welfare effects of such changes in behavior are. Following Musgrave (1959) one may imagine three purposes for government intervention in the economy: allocation, when market failure causes the private outcome to be Pareto inefficient, distribution, when the private market outcome leaves some individuals with unacceptably low shares in the fruits of the economy, and stabilization, when the private market outcome leaves some of the economy's resources underutilized. The recent trend in economic research has tended to emphasize the character of stabilization problems as problems of allocation in the labor market. The effects that government intervention can have on the allocation and distribution of an economy's resources are described in terms of efficiency and incidence effects. These are the primary measures used to evaluate the welfare effects of government policy.




Dynamic Economic Analysis


Book Description

Concise yet rigorous, this textbook provides a clear and systematic introduction to the theory and application of dynamic economic models.







Dynamic and Stochastic Approaches to the Environment and Economic Development


Book Description

This book is a collection of Amitrajeet A Batabyal''s most important papers on the environment and economic development. It begins with a comprehensive and previously unpublished introductory chapter, followed by 12 chapters on different problems such as land use for agricultural purposes, environmental policy design, flood control, and renewable resource management. This book''s uniqueness stems from the fact that it uses novel modeling tools that are largely unfamiliar to economists to shed valuable light on contemporary problems at the interface of the environment and economic development. Sample Chapter(s). Chapter 1: Introduction to Dynamic and Stochastic Approaches to the Environment and Economic Development (127 KB). Contents: Introduction: Introduction to Dynamic and Stochastic Approaches to the Environment and Economic Development; Agriculture: Swidden Agriculture in Developing Countries (with H Beladi); Aspects of Land Use in Slash and Burn Agriculture (with D M Lee); Renewable Resources: Renewable Resource Management in Developing Countries: How Long Until Crisis? (with H Beladi); A Stackelberg Game Model of Trade in Renewable Resources with Competitive Sellers (with H Beladi); A Differential Game Theoretic Analysis of International Trade in Renewable Resources (with H Beladi); Environmental Policy: Dynamic Environmental Policy in Developing Countries with a Dual Economy (with D M Lee); A Dynamic Analysis of Protection and Environmental Policy in a Small Trading Developing Country (with H Beladi); Aspects of the Theory of Environmental Policy in Developing Countries (with H Beladi); and other papers. Readership: Researchers and graduate students in environmental and developmental economics, industry professionals at OC think tanksOCO and resource and development organizations.




The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics


Book Description

The award-winning The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd edition is now available as a dynamic online resource. Consisting of over 1,900 articles written by leading figures in the field including Nobel prize winners, this is the definitive scholarly reference work for a new generation of economists. Regularly updated! This product is a subscription based product.




Taxation in a Global Economy


Book Description

The increasing international mobility of capital, firms and consumers has begun to constrain tax policies in most OECD countries, playing a major role in reforming national tax systems. Haufler uses the theory of international taxation to consider the fundamental forces underlying this process, covering both factor and commodity taxes, as well as their interaction. Topics include a variety of different international tax avoidance strategies - capital flight, profit shifting in multinational firms, and cross-border shopping by consumers. Situations in which tax competition creates conflicting interests between countries are given particular consideration. Haufler addresses the complex issue of coordination in different areas of tax policy, with special emphasis on regional tax harmonization in the European Union. Also included is a detailed introduction to recent theoretical literature.




The Future of American Taxation


Book Description

14 essays by various authors on some aspects of taxation, including the tax system, tax reform en tax policy.