The literature on the average and marginal cost of public funds and the average and marginal excess burden is presently a very rich one. A problem in this literature, is that a whole range of alternative measures are interpreted as representing the cost from collecting tax revenues. This paper...

What are the roots of social capital and how can it be measured and built? Social capital is considered as a new production factor which must be added to the conventional concepts of human and physical capital. Social capital is productive because it increases the level of trust in a society and...

The cost incurred by the sender of an e-mail does not reflect the costs to the recipient, leading to a larger number of messages being sent than is optimal for the general welfare. As a solution, we suggest a per-message e-mail tax on the sender similar to that proposed by Shiman (1996), with...

We provide a model for analyzing effects of the tax system and spending programs on the determination of government spending and taxpayer welfare and show that a tax system or spending program which is suboptimal from a Ramsey point of view can improve taxpayer welfare because the system creates...

In a sequence of illuminating papers, Goulder, Parry, Burtraw and Williams decompose the effects of using environmental instruments like taxes and quotas within a second-best setting, i.e., in the presence of pre-existing taxes. We find this paer of their analyses most revealing. They also...

This paper analyzes the problem of altering the cost structure within an oligopoly, in the presence of costs of manipulation. Oligopolistic firms (which differ from each other in production costs) compete a la Cournot in the second stage, taking as given firm-specific taxees or input prices. In...

Triest (1990) argues that measuring the marginal cost of public funds (MCF) and the marginal excess burden (MEB) requires equivalent variation measures: MCF should be evaluated at consumer prices while MEB requires the use of producer prices. This paper follows up on Triest's argument by showing...

Equivalence scales are defined as the ration between the cost function of households of different size and composition. It is shown that the household cost function depends on the distribution of income or utility within the household. Therefore, neither cost functions nor equivalence scales are...