We evaluate the costs of three different programs for alleviating long term poverty: (i) workfare, or grants made contingent on a work requirement, (ii) universal welfare, or unconditional grants, and (iii) means-tested welfare, or grants conditioned on private labor market earnings. We identify...

Should health care provision be public, private, or both? We look at this question in a setting where people differ in their earnings capacity and express an inelastic demand for health care. We assume that illness reduces a person's health status when not receiving immediate treatment.

Work requirements can make it easier to screen the poor from the non-poor. They can also affect future poverty by changing the poors' incentive to invest in their income capacity. The novelty of our study is the focus on long term poverty.

We evaluate the costs of three different programs for alleviating long term poverty: (i) workfare, or grants made contingent on a work requirement, (ii) universal welfare, or unconditional grants, and (iii) meanstested welfare, or grants conditioned on private labor market earnings. We identify...

We present a framework to identify and evaluate marginal tax reforms when merit good arguments and environmental concerns are given explicit consideration. It is applied to the Norwegian indirect tax system for 1999. The analysis shows that the reform passed in Parliament in November 2000 had a...

Two wealth effects typically arise in any contest: i) wealth decreases the marginal cost of effort, but also ii) decreases the marginal benefit of winning the contest. In this paper, we introduce three types of strategic contest models depending on whether the first, second, or both wealth...