Welfare, Incentives, and Taxation

Nobel Prize-winning economist James Mirrlees is one of the world's leading figures in welfare, development, and public sector economics. This volume brings together for the first time twenty-three of his seminal papers on welfare economics, tax theory, public expenditure, contract theory, growth theory, and development economics. Academic and professional economists, particularly those interested in welfare, development, and public sector economics, will find this collection invaluable.

1 - Information and Incentives: The Economics of Carrots and Sticks
2 - Notes on Welfare Economics, Information, and Uncertainty
3 - The Desirability of Natural Resource Depletion
4 - The Economic Uses of Utilitarianism
5 - Welfare Economics and Economies of Scale
6 - An Exploration in the Theory of Optimum Income Taxation
7 - On Producer Taxation
8 - The Optimum Town
9 - Population Policy and the Taxation of Family Size
10 - Optimal Tax Theory: A Synthesis
11 - The Theory of Optimal Taxation
12 - Migration and Optimal Income Taxes
13 - Taxing Uncertain Incomes
14 - Arguments for Public Expenditure
15 - Optimal Taxation and Government Finance
16 - The Optimal Structure of Incentives and Authority within an Organization
17 - The Theory of Moral Hazard and Unobservable Behaviour: Part I
18 - The Dynamic Nonsubstitution Theorem
19 - Agreeable Plans
20 - Fairly Good Plans
21 - Optimum Saving with Economies of Scale
22 - A Pure Theory of Underdeveloped Economies
23 - Project Appraisal and Planning Twenty Years On: Appendix

James A. Mirrlees is Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College. He was previously Edgeworth Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford (1968-95). In 1996 he won the Nobel Prize for Economics for fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information. His research interests are optimal income taxation; policy implications of imperfect rationality; and principal/agent situations with multidimensional choice variables.