The mix of inflation and income taxation that governments adopt vary considerably across countries. We take a Ramsey optimal-policy approach to explain these differences, focusing on the institutions of the country, modeled as the difficulty of tax evasion, as the key variation across countries. In the model households optimally choose the extent of informal activity and a benevolent government optimally chooses policies, both taking as given the institutions of the economy. The model matches qualitatively the observed relationships between institutions and inflation, taxes and tax evasion. In a cross-country quantitative exercise with 38 countries that have floating exchange rates, the model delivers a good fit: the correlation of data and model-generated values for inflation and taxes are 0.42 and 0.79, respectively. The quantitative exercise further provides evidence for the success of this Ramsey approach in a falsification test, as the fit of the model deteriorates significantly for countries with fixed exchange rates, where the assumptions underlying the Ramsey approach may not hold.

各国政府采用的通货膨胀和所得税的组合差异很大。我们采用拉姆齐最优政策方法来解释这些差异，着眼于以逃税的难度为模型的国家机构，作为各国之间的主要差异。在该模型中，住户最佳地选择了非正式活动的范围，而仁慈的政府则最佳地选择了政策，两者均以经济体制为前提。该模型在质量上匹配了机构与通货膨胀，税收和逃税之间的关系。在38个具有浮动汇率的国家的跨国定量研究中，该模型非常适合：通货膨胀和税收的数据与模型生成值的相关性分别为0.42和0.79。