| In this dissertation, I collect my three papers on economics: two papers on Public Finance, one paper on Macroeconomics.;Chapter 1 studies optimal income taxation and an optimal welfare program within a unified framework. I take welfare stigma into account and use both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations. I reach three conclusions: (1) it is optimal for the government to offer both a negative income tax schedule and a welfare program; (2) the more intensely people suffer from welfare stigma, the higher the welfare benefit should be; and (3) the actual welfare program might be less generous than the optimal welfare program.;Chapter 2 studies geographic variation in Schedule H filing rates. The Schedule H is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) form used to report Social Security and Medicare taxes on wages paid to household employees. Using tax return, Census, and other data, this chapter examines taxpayer characteristics associated with Schedule H filing in order to identify factors responsible for the recent decline in Schedule H filing rates. This research finds that Schedule H filing rates fell among all income groups, but the largest declines occurred among taxpayers with reported AGI less than ;Chapter 3 characterizes the behavior of aggregate price stickiness. I accomplish two tasks. First, I endogenize β, the fraction of the firms keeping their price unchanged following a money supply shock in the near-rationality model (Akerlof and Yellen, 1985) by introducing a distribution of price-adjustment barriers among the firms into the near-rationality model. Second, as β can be considered an indicator of aggregate price stickiness, the endogenized, β enables me to characterize aggregate price stickiness by studying its properties. I show that: (1) lim3→0 β(ϵ) = 1; (2) dbd3&vbm0;3 =0 = 0 ; and (3) the possibility of multiple equilibrium values of β, where ϵ is the fraction change in money supply. |
