Taxation, spending and what governments should do.
10 topics · 9 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Social Insurance and Allied Services
William Beveridge · 1942
Proposes a comprehensive, universal social insurance scheme covering the whole population against want, and lays out the blueprint later built into…
Primary sources and full treatments.
A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures
Charles M. Tiebout · 1956
Argues people 'vote with their feet' among local jurisdictions offering different tax-and-service bundles, which can reveal preferences for public…
+7 more at this level
9 works
William Beveridge
Proposes a comprehensive, universal social insurance scheme covering the whole population against want, and lays out the blueprint later built into Britain's post-war welfare state.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles M. Tiebout
Argues people 'vote with their feet' among local jurisdictions offering different tax-and-service bundles, which can reveal preferences for public goods that national voting cannot.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James Buchanan & Gordon Tullock
Applies economic reasoning to constitution-writing itself, arguing that voting rules should be chosen the way a contract is chosen, for how well they serve everyone before anyone knows which side of a future vote they will be on.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Arnold C. Harberger
Models how a tax formally levied on corporations is actually split between capital, labour and consumers once markets adjust, and finds capital broadly bears the burden across the whole economy.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Anthony B. Atkinson
Shows that ranking income distributions by conventional inequality indices smuggles in a hidden judgement about how much society dislikes inequality, and builds a measure that makes that judgement explicit.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Arnold C. Harberger
Sets out the working assumptions -- competitive prices reflect value, costs and benefits can be added across people, a dollar is worth the same to everyone -- that make applied cost-benefit analysis practically possible.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Robert J. Barro
Extends the AK endogenous-growth model to show that productive government spending, financed by a flat income tax, changes the economy's long-run growth rate itself rather than just its income level -- implying a growth-maximising size of government rather than an ever-larger or ever-smaller one.
link checked 17 Sept 2026James A. Mirrlees
Works through why an income tax schedule that cannot observe ability directly must trade off redistribution against the incentive to work, and derives the shape optimal marginal rates should take.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jean Tirole
Argues regulation cannot be designed from a single textbook formula, because the regulator rarely knows as much as the firm it oversees, and works through how contract design should adapt industry by industry.
link checked 17 Sept 2026