We report here a summary of our recent research on the effect that the race issue, in the United States, and the immigration issue in European countries, is having on the degree of redistribution and the size of the public sector that is implemented through political competition. We model...

We study a model of tax competition between two countries when both skilled and unskilled workers make their migration decisions simultaneously and wages are endogenously determined. If both factors of production are allowed to migrate freely and when the demand for skilled labor is not so...

The CNN exit polls after the 2004 election rated 'moral values' the most important issue; next came 'jobs and the economy.' Eighty percent of the voters who rated moral values the most important issue voted for Bush while eighty percent of the voters who rated jobs and the economy the most...

The present paper studies the effects of bandwagon and underdog on the political equilibrium of two-party competition models. We adapt the generalized Wittman-Roemer model of political competition for voter conformism, which views political competition as the one between parties with factions of...

This paper models the relationship between income and reported well-being using latent class techniques applied to panel data from twelve European countries. Introducing both intercept and slope heterogeneity into this relationship, we strongly reject the hypothesis that individuals transform...

We review the empirical literature that studies the effect of ethnic diversity on the welfare state and on individual attitudes. The outcome variables that we cover in the survey are on the one hand public spending, and on the other hand individual attitudes and behaviour, including charity...

The apparent ubiquity of progressive taxation in advanced democracies has animated research by political economists in the past decade, but little progress has been made in modeling political equilibria over tax policy when labor supply is elastic with respect to taxation. Here, we postulate an...

This project employs the theory of opportunity, described in Roemer''s book (Equality of Opportunity, Harvard University Press, 1998), to compute the extent to which tax-and-transfer regimes in ten countries equalize opportunities among citizens for income acquisition. Roughly speaking, equality...

An in-kind subsidy is equivalent, both theoretically and empirically, to an increase of income for an individual consumer. But the equivalence does not empirically carry over to in-kind grants by a central government to a local one: this has been seen as an anomaly and dubbed the â??flypaper...

Sustainability has been largely replaced by discounted utilitarianism in contemporary climate-change economics. Our approach rejuvenates sustainability by expanding the conception of the quality of life, along the lines of the UN Human Development Reports, to include not only consumption, but...