We construct a general equilibrium model of a two-country trading block where governments through tax policies attract mobile capital, and provide an imported public consumption good. At Nash equilibrium, when the public good is under-provided, (i) a country with a large GDP, has a large Nash...

The Lindahl equilibrium is mostly motivated by a rather artificial price mechanism. Even though the analogy to a competitive market has been emphasised by Lindahl himself his approach does not directly explain the normative ideas, which are behind this concept. In the present paper we therefore...

There is much evidence against the so-called "too big to fail" hypothesis in the case of bailouts to sub-national governments. We look at a model where districts of different size provide local public goods with positive spillovers. Matching grants of a central government can induce...

The relationship between inequality and redistribution is usually studied under the assumption that the government collects different amounts of taxes from each citizen (voter) but gives back the same amount (in cash or in kind) to everyone. In this paper we consider what happens if the...

Fiscal policy has become quite controversial in the post-Keynesian era, the debate over the Obama stimulus package being a contentious recent example. Some pundits go so far as to take the position that macroeconomic theory has failed to meaningfully progress in terms of providing useful...

The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...

This paper develops an expanded framework for social planning in which the existence of coercion is explicitly acknowledged. Key issues concern the precise definition of coercion for individuals and in the aggregate, its difference from redistribution, and its incorporation into normative...

I derive values of marginal changes in a public good for two-person households, measured alternatively by household member i’s willingness to pay (WTP) for the good on behalf of the household, WTPi(H), or by the sum of individual WTP values across family members, WTP(C). Households are assumed...

Consider a setting in which several groups of individuals with common interests (“clubs”) compete with each other for recognition by other individuals. Depending on the context, recognition may be expressed by these other individuals joining a club, or choosing one club to admire. Clubs...

According to economists, severe legal sanctions deter violations of the law. According to legal scholars, people may obey law backed by mild sanctions because of norm-activation. We experimentally investigate the effects of mild and severe legal sanctions in the provision of public goods. The...