Optimal Income Taxation, Public-Goods Provision and Public-Sector Pricing: A Contribution to the Foundations of Public Economics

Martin Hellwig

No 2004_14, Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

Abstract: The paper develops an integrated model of optimal nonlinear income taxation, public-goods provision and pricing in a large economy. With asymmetric information about labour productivities and publicgoods preferences, the multidimensional mechanism design problem becomes tractable by requiring renegotiation proofness of the final allocation of private goods and admission tickets for excludable public goods. Under an affiliation assumption on the underlying distribution, optimal income taxation, public-goods provision and admission fees have the same qualitative properties as in unidimensional models. These properties are obtained for utilitarian welfare maximization and for a Ramsey-Boiteux formulation with interim participation constraints.

Keywords: Optimal Income Taxation; Public Goods; Public-Sector Pricing; Multidimensional Mechanism Design; Ramsey-Boiteux Pricing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 H20 H40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2004-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic, nep-pbe and nep-pub
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (26)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Optimal income taxation, public-goods provision and public-sector pricing: a contribution to the foundations of public economics (2004)
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