A significant part of the revenue in the EU budget is raised via a GNI-based resource. The purpose of this paper is to use a stylized model of an economic federation to analyze how this way of raising funds to the central authority affects the labor income taxes implemented by the lower-level governments. This question is analyzed both when the federal fee is proportional to GNI and proportional to GDP. One key result is that if the government in a lower-level jurisdiction acts as a Nash follower vis-a-vis the other governments in the public sector, then there is an incentive to implement a higher tax on labor. Another is that if the lower-level government is able to exercise decentralized leadership vis-à-vis a federal government which is concerned with redistribution, then the incentive structure underlying the taxation of labor is independent of how the federal government collects its revenue.

In this paper, we analyze how international capital mobility affects the optimal labor and capital income tax policy in a small open economy when consumers care about relative consumption. The main results crucially depend on whether the government can tax returns on savings abroad. If the government can use flexible residence-based capital income taxes, then the optimal policy rules from a closed economy largely carry over to the case of a small open economy. If it cannot, then capital income taxes become completely ineffective. The labor income taxes must then indirectly also reflect the corrective purpose that the absent capital income tax would have had.

In this paper, we study whether the creation of a uniform Nordic and Baltic stock trading platform has affected weak-form information efficiency. A time-varying measure of return predictability for individual stocks is used in a panel-data seting to test for stock market merger effects. The results indicate that the stock market consolidations have had a positive effect on the information efficiency and turnover for an average firm. The merger effects are, however, asymmetrically distributed, indicating, among other, a flight to liquidity effect, i.e. relatively large (small) firms located on relatively large (small) markets experience an improved (reduced) information efficiency.

This paper surveys research on optimal redistributive taxation in economies with environmental externalities. A key question is whether externality correction only motivates an adjustment of the tax policy rule for the externality-generating activity, or whether the marginal value of the externality directly enters the policy rules for other tax instruments as well. In a static benchmark model with an atmospheric consumption externality, where the government uses a mix of a nonlinear income tax and linear commodity taxes, one can show that Sandmo's (1975) additivity property applies. This means that externality correction leads to an additional term (measuring the marginal value of the externality) in the commodity tax formula for the externality-generating good, while the policy rules for commodity taxation of clean goods and marginal income taxation take the same form as in the absence of any externality. We also extend this benchmark model to capture a number of scenarios (such as non-atmospheric externalities, border trade in the externality-generating good, and competition between governments in a multi-country framework), where the additivity property no longer applies. We end by examining an intertemporal model of optimal taxation with a stock-externality, allowing us to integrate the study of optimal redistributive taxation with literature on environmental economics and policy based on dynamic models.

This paper develops a dynamic model with endogenous labor supply, savings and health capital, where the consumers differ in ability as well as suffer from a self-control problem generated by quasi-hyperbolic discounting. The purpose is to analyze how a paternalistic government, which implements a time-consistent mix of labor income taxation, capital income taxation and commodity taxation, ought to use this tax system for purposes of redistribution and correction when individual ability is private information. Among the results, we show how the (nonlinear) income taxes ought to be used as indirect instruments for influencing the commodity demand behavior at the individual level: the intuition is that linear commodity taxes are not flexible enough to achieve proper incentives for consumption of unhealthy goods.

In this paper we study whether the creation of a uniform Nordic and Baltic stock trading platform has affected weak-form information efficiency. In the study, a time-varying measure of return predictability for individual stocks is used in a panel-data setting to test for stock market merger effects. The results indicate that the stock market consolidations have had a positive effect on the information efficiency and turnover for an average firm. The merger effects are, however, asymmetrically distributed which indicates a flight to liquidity effect in the sense that relatively large (small) firms located on relatively large (small) markets experience an improved (reduced) information efficiency and turnover. Although the results indicate that changes in the level of investor attention (measured by turnover) may explain part of the changes in information efficiency, they also lend support to the hypothesis that merger effects may partially be driven by changes in the composition of informed versus uninformed investors following a stock.

Drawing on psychological theories of social identity and cognitive dissonance, we develop a dynamic model for the evolution of female labour supply. We assume that agents, in addition to consumption and leisure, also derive utility from complying with social and personal norms such that deviations from norms induce psychological costs. An important contribution is that we allow for conflicting norms and we assume that the weight of these norms in the agent's utility is endogenous. We show that conflicting norm incentives may have long-run effects on labour supply: for example, the long-run effect of a wage increase on labour supply is reinforced if agents can adjust the weight attached to a given norm, and that women may be prevented from making a full transition from homemakers to breadwinners if such a transition make them outsiders in society.

This paper re-examines the question of whether federal ex-post redistribution in terms of public funds leads to under-provision of public goods when member states may leave the economic federation. We show that federal ex-post redistribution under a binding participation constraint does not necessarily mean under-provision of local and federal public goods.

This paper concerns income taxation and commodity taxation in a multi-jurisdiction framework with transboundary environmental damage. The decision-problem facing the government in each such jurisdiction is represented by a two-type model (with asymmetric information between the government and the private sector). We show how the possibility to influence the world-market producer price adds mechanisms of relevance for redistribution and externality-correction which, in turn, affect the domestic use of taxation. Finally, with the noncooperative Nash equilibrium as a reference case, we consider the welfare effects of policy coordination.

Purpose - Empirical studies have found an 'inverted U-curve' relationship between emigration and per capita income. In this paper, a theoretical underpinning for this phenomenon is presented based on credit restrictions. The implications for tax policy are also analyzed.Design/methodology/approach - Using an intertemporal general equilibrium model, the authors characterize how the presence of an 'inverted U-curve' relationship between emigration and per capita income will influence the optimal tax and expenditure policy in a country where agents have the option to move abroad.Findings - Among the results it is shown that if age dependent taxes are available, the presence of an 'inverted U-curve' provides an incentive to tax young labor harder, but old labor less hard, than otherwise.