Prof. Louis Kaplow, Harvard Law School, USA

The lecture will draw on the recently published book, The Theory of Taxation and Public Economics, which presents a unified conceptual framework for analyzing taxation and other fiscal instruments. Subjects include optimal income taxation, commodity taxation, government expenditures on transfer programs and on public goods, a number of other applications, and the welfare economic underpinnings of redistributive taxation. The lecture will present this core framework and discuss how it brings a common methodology to disparate subjects, enhances understanding of traditional but difficult problems, yields solutions to previously intractable challenges, facilitates concrete policy analysis, and suggests an agenda for further theoretical investigation as well as empirical research.