Sir James Mirrlees, co‐recipient of the 1996 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, passed away in August 2018. This article outlines how his work has transformed economists’ understanding of their discipline – from the principles of tax design to the theory of contracts and beyond. By conceiving of policy questions in terms of information asymmetries between governments and taxpayers, Mirrlees demonstrated how to conduct convincing analysis of redistributive objectives together with incentive effects in the design of general tax systems and public policy more broadly. His ability to simplify complex problems in ways that reveal their tractable essence means that his work has yielded insights that have reverberated throughout the discipline. It has also proved highly fruitful for practical policy design.
Authors
CPP Co-Director
Richard is Co-Director of the Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy (CPP) and Senior Research Fellow at IFS.
Research Fellow University College London
Ian is a Research Fellow of the IFS and a Professor of Economics at UCL. He joined UCL in 1991 and has been attached to the IFS since 1990.
Journal article details
- DOI
- 10.1111/1475-5890.12183
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Issue
- Volume 40, February 2019, pages 5 - 18
Suggested citation
Blundell, R and Preston, I. (2019). 'Principles of Tax Design, Public Policy and Beyond: The Ideas of James Mirrlees, 1936–2018' 40(2019), pp.5 – 18.
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