The Mirrlees Review recommends that commodity taxation should in general be uniform, but with some goods consumed in conjunction with labour supply (such as child care) left untaxed. This paper examines the validity of this claim in an optimal income tax framework. Contrary to the recommendation...

We revisit the classical result that financing a pure public good through taxation of private consumption is inefficient. To this standard setup we add a consumption contest in which consumers can win a prize. We show that an appropriately chosen contest — which we call a ‘tax lottery' —...

This paper studies a class of second-best solutions to the Volunteer's Dilemma. We consider a simultaneous-move game involving n players, each of whom can prevent social harm at a cost. Players could be rewarded for helping, be punished for not helping, or be subject to any combination of...

We compare laboratory general equilibrium economies in which maintenance of a depreciating public facility is financed either by anonymous voluntary contributions or taxes. Agents individually allocate their private goods between consumption and investment in production. The experimental...

The world faces multiple challenges in producing global public goods, such as climate change mitigation, financial stability, security from nuclear terror, knowledge production, and the eradication of infectious diseases. International law scholarship, in the meantime, takes a turn towards...

A simple sufficient condition is proved for symmetric Markov subgame perfect Nash equilibria in public-good differential games with a single state variable. The condition admits equilibria in feedback strategies that have discontinuous dependence on the state variable. The application of the...

We estimate the value of a statistical life (VSL), or the willingness to trade-off wealth and mortality risk, among 430,000 U.S. Army soldiers choosing whether to reenlist from 2002-2010. Using a discrete choice random utility approach and significant variation in retention bonuses and mortality...

Do voters see democracy entirely as a game of self-interest in which one person’s gain is another’s loss, or do they also view it as a search for the common good, as some democracy theorists have long conjectured? Existing empirical research that assumes entirely private interests cannot...

While trust is the cornerstone in the functioning of any market, it is of particular importance in the markets that are unregulated, illiquid, and opaque, such as the art market. We therefore examine the role of authenticity, as captured by the provenance information, on the sales probability of...

The global community faces a number of critical challenges ranging from climate change to crossborder health risks to natural-resource scarcities. Many of these so-called global commons problems carry grave risks to economic growth in the developing world and to the livelihoods and welfare of...