Restoring Ramsey tax lessons to Mirrleesian tax settings: Atkinson–Stiglitz and Ramsey reconciled

Helmuth Cremer, Firouz Gahvari

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

This paper restores many of the Ramsey tax/pricing lessons perceived as outdated in the optimal tax literature following the Atkinson and Stiglitz (J Public Econ 6:55–75, 1976) framework wherein differential commodity taxes are considered to be redundant. The key to our findings is the incorporation of a “break-even constraint” for public firms into the Atkinson and Stiglitz framework. Break-even constraints are fundamental to the regulatory pricing literature but have somehow been overlooked in the optimal tax literature. Incorporating them reconciles the optimal-tax and the regulatory-pricing views on Ramsey tax/pricing rules.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)11-35
Number of pages25
JournalSocial Choice and Welfare
Volume49
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 1 2017

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Social Sciences (miscellaneous)
  • Economics and Econometrics

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