Rather than about absolute payoffs, governments in fiscal competition often seem to care about their performance relative to other governments. Moreover, they often appear to mimic policies observed elsewhere. We study such behaviour in a tax competition game with mobile capital à la...

In fiscal interaction, a policy is evolutionarily stable if, once adopted by all governments, jurisdictions that deviate from it fare worse than those that stick to it. Evolutionary stability is the appropriate solution concept for models of imitative learning (policy mimicking). We show that...

One of the main reasons to include pay-as-you-go (PAYG) schemes in multi-pillared pension systems is that they may entail beneficial risk-sharing and diversification features However, depending on the pension formula these features vary significantly for different types of PAYG schemes. We...

We study the efficiency and distributional consequences of establishing and abolishing the draft in a dynamic model with overlapping generations, taking into account endogenous human capital formation as well as government budget constraints. The introduction of the draft initially benefits the...

Using data from 1960-2000 for OECD countries, we analyze the impact of compulsory military service on the demand for higher education, measured by students enrolled in tertiary education as a share of the working-age population. Based on a theoretical model, we hypothesize that military draft...

Contests between groups are plagued by intra-group externalities (freeriding). Yet, costless incentive schemes that entirely avoid free-riding within a group might not be desirable, neither individually nor socially. In contests among two groups, a relatively weak (i.e., small or unproductive)...

Though in decline recently, military conscription is still a widely used mode of staffing armies. Since not many valid economic, social or military arguments in favor of the draft can be put forward, the question emerges why societies choose to rely on it. In this survey we explain the political...

We investigate optimal taxation of lifetime income with and without an emigration option during old age. The government sets the rates of deferred taxation and of possibly reduced taxation of interest. If agents are immobile, the optimal policy consists in full deferral of income taxes on...

We argue that societies with a stronger tendency towards postmaterialist life goals tilt the tax structure towards personal income taxes and away from corporate taxation. We provide empirical evidence for this correlation in OECD countries. To address endogeneity issues we then use an...

We augment a standard tax model by concerns about tax equity: people get upset when labour is taxed more heavily than capital. Even the slightest concern for tax equity invalidates the common recommendation for small open economies that capital should remain tax-exempt. This holds for exogenous...