Three essays on taxation and public pricing

This dissertation contains three essays. They are "On Optimal Excise Taxes: Becker’s Household-Production Approach", "The Pricing of Public Intermediate Goods Revisited", and "Piecemeal Design and Reform of Commodity Taxes". In the first essay, Becker’s household production model is used to investigate optimal excise taxes. We are particularly interested in what can be said about the optimal tax structure from the information of household production activities and the new insights that can be gained into the optimal tax structure by using Becker’s approach. In the second essay, we revisit the pricing of publicly produced inputs for competitive downstream industries under a general equilibrium setting and with a general production technology. We emphasize the dependence of the price structure of the private sector upon public prices and explore the consequences on the public pricing rules with such a dependence. In the third essay, we consider the design and reform of commodity taxes with a given general income tax. The major part of the paper investigates tax reforms which are Pareto-improving from the status quo, with and without lump-sum taxes.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Economics

Department dc:contributor.department

Economics

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Year dc:date.issued

1989

Author dc:creator

• Yang, C. C.

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Gahvari, Firouz

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Cremer, Helmuth
• Cremer, Jacques
• Haller, Hans
• Steinberg, Richard S.

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10919/54817

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/54817