This theoretical paper shows how a central government can induce a policy concerning a municipal matter through a package of a policy requirement and a grant. We find that, due to fiscal competition and the possibility for citizens to move between municipalities, the central government can make...

This paper studies the effects of public child-care subsidies on parental time allocation. We develop a model where parents are allowed to utilize subsidized care during both working and leisure hours. The model distinguishes between subsidies to child-care quality and to fees. Three types of...

Paid maternity leave has gained greater salience in the past few decades as mothers have increasingly entered the workforce. Indeed, the median number of weeks of paid leave to mothers among OECD countries was 14 in 1980, but had risen to 42 by 2011. We assess the case for paid maternity leave,...

Human capital and, therefore, education have an impact on the societys future welfare. In this paper we study the connection between the voters support to public education and the retirement concerns. We show that voters anticipate the positive effect of education on future pensions. The support...

This paper analyses the behaviour of pharmaceutical companies that face the threat of having their drugs excluded from reimbursement and the markets characterised also by price caps. We conclude that price elasticity of demand and cost differentials cause the price discounts which drug firms...

Many publicly funded health systems use prospective activity-based financing to increase hospital production and efficiency. The aim of this study is to investigate whether price changes for different treatments affect the mix of activity provided by hospitals. We exploit variations in prices...

We develop a conflict model linking dissipation to the distribution of the population over an arbitrary number of groups. We extend the pure contest version of the model by Esteban and Ray (1999) to include a mixed public-private good. We analyze how the level of dissipation changes as the...

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 investigates the strategic interactions between carbon taxation by a resource-consumers’ coalition and (wellhead) energy pricing by a producers’ cartel under possible innovation in a cheap carbon-free technology through a dynamic game. The arrival time of innovation is uncertain,...

Conventional economic theory stipulates that output in Cournot competition is too low relative to that which is attained in perfect competition. We revisit this result in a General Cournot-competitive Equilibrium model with two industries that dier only in terms of productivity. We show that in...