We present a simple model of capital accumulation where agents care about their consumption relative to the consumption of other members of society. This concern with "envy" captures the intuition behind the growing body of empirical evidence that places interpersonal comparisons as a key...

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...

The starting point for this paper is the potential self-control problem underlying the consumption of unhealthy food. The purpose is to analyze public policies, which are designed to correct for the welfare loss associated with such behavior. Contrary to previous studies, our analysis suggests...

This paper concerns international coordination of environmental taxation. The main purpose is to study the global welfare effects that will arise, if there is an agreement between countries to slightly increase their emission taxes. We show that even if each individual country has chosen its...

This paper analyzes the consequences of lobby group activity for policy outcomes in economies with transboundary pollution and international environmental policies. In our framework, international environmental policies are characterized as pollution taxes determined in a negotiation between two...

This thesis consists of four self-contained papers on job turnover, productivity and state-local finance.<p> Paper [I] deals with the determinants of the rate of job turnover defined as the change in distribution of employment between and within industries in Swedish manufacturing. The rate of...</p>

This paper analyzes optimal taxation and risk-sharing arrangements in an economy with two levels of government. Both levels provide public goods and finance their expenditures via labor income taxation, where the tax base is responsive to the private agents' labor supply decisions. The...

In nonpoint source pollution problems, the regulator does not observe each polluter’s individual emission, which prevents him from using the conventional policy instruments. Therefore new instruments have been designed to regulate this type of pollution. In an experiment, we compare the...

The burning of fossil fuels not only causes CO2 emissions but at the same time impairs local environmental quality such as ambient air quality. The present paper analyzes the possible distortion arising from international trade in CO2 emissions when local externalities persist. It is...