Matthias Wrede Books

This paper proposes the question whether or not traveling expenses to work should be deductible from the income tax base. In order to answer this question, a simple model of (im- ) perfect household and worker mobility is employed. The focus of the analysis is on the efficient use of land and the efficient allocation of people and labor in a multi-region framework. The paper shows that deductibility is inefficient only if households are perfectly mobile and if households cannot choose their place of work. If the region of work is not exogenously fixed, traveling expenses to work should be deductible at more than one hundred percent, even if households choose simultaneously the place of work and the region of residence, and even if tax rates are not standardized within the federation

The paper considers an unfunded linear pension system when workers make labor decisions more often than once in their life. To capture this feature, a three-period-overlapping-generations model is employed. On the one hand, the paper analyzes whether or not a Pay-as-you-go pension scheme is intergenerational Pareto efficient when labor is elastically supplied by the young and the middle-aged people. On the other hand, the focus is on the interregional efficiency of a Pay-as-you-go system when young and middle-aged workers are mobile