This paper concerns optimal income taxation under asymmetric information in a two-type overlapping generations model, where people care about their relative consumption compared to others. The appearance of positional concerns affects the policy choices via two channels: (i) the size of the...

This paper deals with optimal income taxation and relative consumption under a welfarist government that fully respects people’s preferences and a paternalist government that does not share the consumer preference for relative consumption. Consistent with previous findings, relative...

The optimal provision of a state-variable public good, where the global climate is the prime example, is analyzed in a model where people care about their relative consumption. We consider both keeping-up-with-the-Joneses preferences (where people compare their own current consumption with...

Previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure comparisons. This paper considers a two-type optimal nonlinear income tax model where people care both about their relative consumption and their relative leisure. Increased consumption...

This paper concerns optimal income taxation and provision of a state-variable public good under asymmetric information in a two-type overlapping generations model, where people care about their relative consumption. Each individual may compare his/her own current consumption with his/her own...

This paper concerns optimal nonlinear taxation in an OLG model with two ability-types, where people care about their own consumption relative to (i) other people’s current consumption, (ii) own past consumption, and (iii) other people’s past consumption. We show that intertemporal...

Almost all previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure for status comparisons. Inspired by Veblen (1899), this paper considers a two-type optimal income tax model, where people care about their relative consumption, and where the...

Alcoholic beverages are taxed at very different rates across the European Union, which implies extensive cross-border shopping. Therefore, there is an ongoing debate about harmonization of alcohol taxes among countries. Sweden, with a tradition of high alcohol taxes due to public health...

This study estimates the fiscal cost of refugee immigration. This is done by calculating the total value of economic resources that are redistributed through the public sector in Sweden in 2007 to the population of immigrants who once arrived in the country as refugees or their family members....

When Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007 Sweden was one of two EU15 countries that did not restrict access to its labor market and welfare systems for Romanian and Bulgarian citizens. This article evaluates the net fiscal contribution in 2011 of Romanian and Bulgarian migrants who arrived...