Optimal Fiscal Policies, Congestion and Over‐entry*

B-Tier
Journal: Scandanavian Journal of Economics
Year: 2007
Volume: 109
Issue: 1
Pages: 137-151

Authors (4)

Juin‐jen Chang (not in RePEc) Hsiao‐wen Hung (not in RePEc) Jhy‐yuan Shieh (Soochow University) Ching‐chong Lai (Academia Sinica)

Score contribution per author:

0.503 = (α=2.01 / 4 authors) × 1.0x B-tier

α: calibrated so average coauthorship-adjusted count equals average raw count

Abstract

By shedding light on market imperfections and the congestion of public goods, we show that free entry in a market equilibrium will lead to excessive entry relative to the social optimum. Moreover, by specifying a generalized congestion function, it is also shown that different fiscal policies, including labor income tax, capital income tax and government expenditure, play a distinct role in terms of remedying market distortions. Specifically, optimal income taxes decrease with the degree of market imperfections in order to remove the monopoly inefficiency, while they increase with the degree of congestion in order to remedy the adverse externality caused by congestion distortion. Since a higher degree of increasing returns to an expansion in the variety of intermediate goods is found to intensify the congestion effect of government infrastructure expenditure, the optimal rule of government expenditure proposed by Barro (1990) should be modified.

Technical Details

RePEc Handle
repec:bla:scandj:v:109:y:2007:i:1:p:137-151
Journal Field
General
Author Count
4
Added to Database
2026-01-25