Public Provision of Private Goods and Equilibrium Unemployment

This paper concerns public provision of a private good in a two-type model with optimal nonlinear income taxation. We assume that the wage rates are determined by bargaining between unions and firms, meaning that the equilibrium is characterized by unemployment. We show that, if the labor market is imperfectly competitive, additional mechanisms arise via the self-selection constraint, which may justify either more or less public provision of the private good than under perfect competition. Furthermore, public provision of private goods becomes a tool to influence the employment.