Debt Sustainability: Analytics for Long-Run Fiscal Management
Why rigorous sustainability analytics must be embedded in institutions, not just spreadsheets, to prevent fiscal crises
Land Value Taxation: The Efficiency Case for an Underutilized Instrument
Why the most efficient tax instrument in theory remains the most underused in practice—and how to change that
Property Tax Assessment: Achieving Uniformity in an Inherently Subjective Process
Why property tax uniformity is a mechanism design problem, not merely a measurement challenge
Fiscal Multipliers: When Government Spending Pays for Itself
Why the same dollar of government spending can be worthless or transformative depending on when it's deployed
Third-Party Reporting: The Unsung Foundation of Modern Tax Systems
Why the information employers and banks report matters more for revenue than the rates Congress debates.
Fiscal Rules: Constraining Governments Without Constraining Good Policy
The architecture of fiscal rules determines whether they constrain deficit bias or countercyclical policy—getting the design right matters enormously.
Behavioral Public Finance: Redesigning Systems for Real Humans
Why optimal tax design requires understanding how people actually think, not how theory assumes they calculate.
The Political Economy of Tax Reform: Why Good Ideas Fail
Public choice theory explains why economically optimal tax systems rarely survive the political process of adoption.
Tax Competition: Race to the Bottom or Efficient Discipline
Why mobile capital disciplines some governments while destroying others—and how international frameworks try to preserve the good competition while preventing the bad.
Designing Optimal Transfer Programs Under Information Constraints
How mechanism design principles reveal the hidden architecture of welfare programs that actually work
Fiscal Federalism: Optimal Assignment of Taxing and Spending Powers
Why the right level of government for each fiscal function depends on mobility, spillovers, and the fundamental impossibility of local redistribution.
Intergovernmental Transfers: Achieving Equity Without Destroying Incentives
Why equalizing fiscal capacity across jurisdictions risks destroying the very incentives that generate prosperity to redistribute.
Corporate Tax Incidence: Who Really Bears the Burden
General equilibrium analysis reveals how corporate tax burdens shift among shareholders, workers, and consumers through capital mobility and market structure channels.
Capital Income Taxation: The Zero-Rate Theorem and Its Many Exceptions
Why optimal tax theory both supports and undermines taxing investment returns—and how to design systems that navigate the tradeoffs.
Inverse Elasticity Rules: The Hidden Logic Behind Ramsey Pricing
Why optimal taxes require higher rates on goods people keep buying regardless of price, and how fairness complicates the math
Wealth Taxation: Optimal Design in a World of Rising Concentration
Why taxing accumulated fortunes requires solving enforcement puzzles, return heterogeneity questions, and political economy challenges before setting optimal rates.
Optimal Income Tax Schedules: Reconciling Mirrlees with Political Reality
Why real-world tax systems deviate from Mirrlees optimality—and which gaps represent genuine reform opportunities versus unavoidable constraints.
Why Top Marginal Tax Rates Generate Such Fierce Debate Among Economists
Why the optimal top tax rate remains genuinely uncertain, and what that uncertainty reveals about the limits of economic precision in guiding fiscal policy.
Why Diamond-Mirrlees Production Efficiency Remains the Cornerstone of Modern Tax Design
Discover why taxing business inputs destroys more welfare than it raises revenue, and how this 1971 theorem still defines optimal tax architecture.
The Atkinson-Stiglitz Theorem: When Commodity Taxation Becomes Redundant
Understanding when differential commodity taxes enhance welfare requires knowing precisely when the elegant case for uniformity fails