Table of Contents

Part I: Welfare Economics 1: Information and Incentives: The Economics of Carrots and Sticks 2: Notes on Welfare Economics, Information, and Uncertainty 3: with John A. Kay: The Desirability of Natural Resource Depletion 4: The Economic Uses of Utilitarianism 5: Welfare Economics and Economies of Scale Part II: Tax Theory 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 Part III: Public Expenditure 14: Arguments for Public Expenditure 15: Optimal Taxation and Government Finance Part IV: Contract Theory 16: The Optimal Structure of Incentives and Authority within an Organization 17: The Theory of Moral Hazard and Unobservable Behaviour: Part I Part V: Growth Theory 18: The Dynamic Nonsubstitution Theorem 19: with Peter J. Hammond: Agreeable Plans 20: With Avinash Dixit and Nicholas Stern: Fairly Good Plans 21: Optimum Saving with Economies of Scale Part VI: Development Economics 22: A Pure Theory of Underdeveloped Economies 23: With Ian Little: Project Appraisal and Planning Twenty Years On: Appendix

About the Author

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.

Reviews

`James Mirrlees' special gift is to bring new perspectives to the understanding of major economic issues, economic growth and the choice of taxes. The importance of asymmetric information in the optimality of taxes was one of his greatest contributions, the study of different aspects of the role of increasing returns in economic growth another. Drawing these contributions, scattered over many journals, into a single volume will remind of the power of Mirrlees's analysis and make reference that much easier. ' Kenneth J. Arrow, Nobel Laureate and Professor Emeritus of Economics, Stanford University