These papers are all unfinished and I hope to finish them when I have time. I post them because it is not clear when I'll find time to make progress on them and they already contain some interesting results.
As far as moral aspects are concerned, I consider them as (provisionally) finished. So, do not feel free to steal from these documents without citing these papers.
Would shifting the tax burden from labor to capital reduce unemployment?
History: This paper was prepared for a CEPR conference in the city of A Corunha (Spain) in June 1997 over the future of the welfare state. The organizers planned to have a conference volume so I took the pain of actually writing a paper. However, as is often the case, we have not heard of the conference volume since the meeting was held, so the paper has been left in its preliminary draft state as of June 1997.
Excerpt: It is often argued that high payroll taxes in Europe are responsible for its unemployment rate. While one possible solution is to reduce the burden of the welfare state, another popular proposal is to change the financing of the welfare state by shifting taxes from labor to capital. At face value, the idea makes sense, since the profit rate has been soaring while wages have stagnated and joblessness is a key issue. However, increasing taxes on capital clearly reduces capital accumulation and consequently the marginal product of labor at any given employment level. In a world of real wage rigidity this induces an increase in unemployment, which has to be balanced against the drop in unemployment generated by lower payroll taxes. The net effect is clearly ambiguous and its sign ultimately depends on the economy's parameters. The purpose of this paper is to empirically assess the impact of such a tax reform on unemployment.
Over the lat 20 years, France has dropped from the top countries in terms of GDP per capita, to a ranking which is somewhere between 11th and 20th. This paper investigates whether there has been some compensations on the 'social front'. It looks at a variety of indicators, such as income distribution, education, health, crime, suicide, innovation, and new information technologies. Some striking findings: France is ranked 38th in male probability of dying between 15 and 69, despite being the 4th spender on health; it is ranked 19th in Internet host intensity...