In a paper delivered at the December 1955 meeting of the Econometric Society, Paul Samuelson noted that though economists had done "work of high quality and great quantity in the field of taxation," the theory of public expenditure had been "relatively neglected" (1958, 332). Anglo-American...

We investigate how income inequality affects social welfare in a model of voluntary contributions to multiple pure public goods. Itaya, de Meza, and Myles (1997) show that the maximization of social welfare precludes income equality in a single pure public good model. In contrast, we show that...

Specialized theoretical and empirical research should in principle be embedded in a unified framework that identifies the relevant interactions among different phenomena, enables an appropriate matching of policy instruments to objectives, and grounds normative analysis in individuals' utilities...

We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identical individual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric and concave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles (Econ....

Based on the premise that fairness is different from equity and that it is primarily used in informal contexts we present an economic approach to fairness. Discussing the results of behavioral economics reveals the experience that people do not accept a monetary offer even if that collides with...