Earlier literature on tax competition and policy coordination typically assumes that the labor market is competitive; a description less suitable for Europe, where trade unions have had a strong position in the labor market for a long time. This paper concerns factor income taxation and public...

This paper shows how the first-best and second-best rules for optimal public good provision depend on the adaptation to private and public consumption. Adaptation in private consumption typically leads to over-provision relative to the Samuelson condition, while adaptation in public consumption...

During the latest decades, household mortgage loans have increased substantially in many countries. We develop an OLG model where housing is a positional consumption good (such that housing choices are partly driven by relative consumption concerns), and where the consumers are also...

A significant part of the revenue in the EU budget is raised via a GNI-based resource. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how this way of raising funds to the central authority in an economic federation affects the tax policy implemented by the lower level jurisdictions. This question is...

This thesis consists of an introductory chapter and four papers, which relate to environmental policy in the presence of transboundary environmental damage. Paper [I] concerns public policy in a multi-jurisdiction framework with transboundary environmental damage. Each jurisdiction is assumed...

This paper addresses transboundary environmental problems in the context of an optimal tax problem, when part of the labor force is mobile across countries. The policy instruments include both commodity taxation and nonlinear income taxation. We show how the tax policy in a noncooperative...

This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two papers are theoretical contributions within the area of optimal taxation and public expenditures under asymmetric information between the government and the private sector, and the last two are empirical contributions to the...

This paper concerns optimal income taxation in the presence of emigration. The basic model is a two-period model where all agents are identical and live in the home country in the first period of life, but where some emigrate at the end of the first period. It is shown that with a binding credit...

The purpose of this paper is to design a test of whether the vertical external effects associated with tax base sharing among local and regional governments have become internalized via the intergovernmental transfer system. Such tests are important in the sense that the income tax rates chosen...

Almost all previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure for status comparisons. Inspired by Veblen (1899), this paper considers a two-type optimal income tax model, where people care about their relative consumption, and where the...