This paper shows that public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals have relative consumption concerns. By providing private goods, governments directly intervene in the consumption structure, thereby having an instrument to...

The question of a double dividend from revenue-neutral ecological tax reforms (an ecological advantage plus an economic advantage) has recently become a widely discussed topic both in real-world economic policy and in economic theory. The subject has produced many advocates and opponents in the...

This paper makes a fresh attempt at characterizing optimal commodity taxes. Under the usual assumptions, an extremely simple expression of second-best commodity taxes is derived, showing tax rates as functions of observable variables only, rather than as functions of unobservable variables such...

Considering the extent to which progress is being made with the integration of the European Capital Market, harmonisation of the taxation of income is becoming increasingly important. Efficient allocation of capital must not be hindered by inter-governmental tax differentials.Following more than...

According to a widely held belief, all who are able to work, should work . We consider this statement within a framework of non-linear taxation. The crucial differ-ence between our model and the standard model is that the government can distinguish between productive persons and the disabled. A...

In recent contributions, Weizsäcker (2014) and Summers (2014) maintain that mature economies accumulate too much capital. They suggest large and lasting public deficits as a remedy. This paper argues that overaccumulation cannot occur in an economy with land. It presents novel data of aggregate...

This is a postprint of a paper that was published in the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 146, 1990, pp. 640-647

This is a postprint of a paper that was published 1997 in H. Giersch (Ed.) Reforming the Welfare State. Berlin: Springer-Verlag

Recently, early investments in the human capital of children from socially disadvantaged environments have attracted a great deal of attention. In a discrete version of the Mirrlees model with a parents' and a children's generation we show the intra-generational and the inter-generational...

This paper sets up a two-period, two-sector trade model of a developing country which is abundant in a natural resource but scarce in industrial goods. It shows that lower future travel costs, rising demand for tourism and higher preferences for the environment slow down today´s depletion of...