This book reflects the reality of most taxpayers. It provides a comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of optimal tax issues from a household economics perspective. A unified and integrated approach is employed to analyze optimal taxation in a homogeneous way. The author adopts a household production approach to allow a critical understanding of the way tax policy impacts economic agents. This way home activities can be studied with the same toolbox normally employed for the market activities. This is motivated by the fact that in reality most agents act from within a family, and their interaction with the economy at large and tax policy in particular is mediated by the interdependence of the family members' choices, although taxation is typically studied in a framework in which the economic agents are isolated individuals. The aim of the book is to provide, a comprehensive treatment of family taxation whithin this approach, focusing on the normative side - social welfare maximising taxation. As a consequence of the book's analysis, many important and established results in public economics may have to be revised. The book will be useful to both graduate students and researchers alike in that it adopts a rigorous analytical language but also includes ample intuitive explanations.

Autorentext

Alessandro Balestrino is a full professor of Public Economics at the Department of Political Science, University of Pisa, Italy. He also is a fellow of the Center for Economic Studies (CESifo), Munich, Germany. He acts as a referee for several international journals and has published various articles himself. His research focuses on taxation of the family, optimal taxation, public provision of private goods, non-welfarist theories of poverty and social norms.