A partly heuristic attempt at exploring long-run policies aimed at a second-best compromis between ex ante risk-sharing efficiency and ex post productive efficiency. Wage subsidies for low-skilled workers financed vy taxes on high wages are advocated, together with imposed risk sharing between...

This paper presents a simple two-country model with mobile capital and immobile labour, in which there are two classes of individuals, the workers and the capital owners. A source-based tax on capital income is used to finance transfers to workers. If the two countries are homogeneous in all...

Much attention has been given to the impact of fiscal competition on the level of public expenditure, but relatively little to the impact on its composition. Using a broadly familiar and reasonably rich model of fiscal competition in the presence of mobile capital, this paper establishes a...

We consider the problem of assigning agents to slots on a line, where only one agent can be served at a slot and each agent prefers to be served as close as possible to his target. Our focus is on utilitarian methods, i.e., those that minimize the total gap between targets and assigned slots. We...

According to standard theory founded on Harsanyi (1953, 1955) a social welfare function can be appropriately based on the individual’s approach to choice under uncertainty. We investigate whether people really do rank distributions according to the same principles irrespective of whether the...

In an exogenous-growth economy with overlapping generations (OG) we analyse local stability of the balanced growth equilibria with respect to perturbations of consumption endowments, thought of as the "monetised" value of a government policy to individuals. We show that perturbed economies have...

We present a new version of the overtaking criterion, which we call generalized time invariant overtaking. The generalized time-invariant overtaking criterion (on the space of infinite utility streams) is defined by extending proliferating sequences of complete and transitive binary relations...