Human capital and, therefore, education have an impact on the society’s future welfare. In this paper we study the connection between the voters’ support to public education and the retirement concerns. We show that voters anticipate the positive effect of education on future pensions. The...

We study voting over higher education finance in an economy with risk averse households who are heterogeneous in income. We compare four different systems and analyse voters' choices among them: a traditional subsidy scheme, a pure loan scheme, income contingent loans and graduate taxes. Using...

We study the political economy of state limitations on the taxing powers of local governments, investigating the effects of such restriction on housing markets, community composition, and types of taxes and expenditures undertaken by local governments. We characterize equilibrium when voters...

We study the effect of child care costs on the fertility behavior of Swedish women and find that reductions in child care charges influence fertility decisions, even when costs are initially highly subsidized. Exploiting the exogenous variation in child care costs caused by a Swedish child care...

We use data for all Italian municipalities, from 2001-2006, to empirically test the extent to which two electoral rules, which hold, for small and large municipalities, affect fiscal policy decisions. Municipalities with fewer than 15,000 inhabitants elect their mayors in accordance with a...

In a decentralised tax system, the effects of tax policies enacted by one government are not confined to its own jurisdiction. First, if the tax base is mobile, tax rate increases by one regional government will raise the amount of taxes collected by other regional governments (horizontal tax...

Concurrent taxation is a feature of many federal systems. As a result, the tax policy of one level of government affects the tax base of the other. A way to check the empirical relevance of this hypothesis is to test for the existence of interdependencies in the tax setting behaviour of various...

This paper derives the optimal pension and tax parameters in a society where individuals differ in two characteristics: rationality and productivity. Rational agents, if not liquidity constrained, smooth consumption over their life-cycle. Myopic agents, by contrast, have ex ante a strong...

Besley and Rosen (1998) were the first authors to empirically estimate the presence of vertical tax externalities. They tested it on gasoline and tobacco unitary taxes. However, they did not take into account the difference in cost of living across states: high cost areas pay less in real terms...

We examine policies directed at regulating tobacco consumption through three types of instruments: (i) an excise tax hindering consumption by increasing the price of cigarettes, (ii) prevention programs helping consumers to make choices that are more time consistent when trading-off the current...