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...

The achievements and limitations of the classical theory of optimal labor-income taxation based on social welfare functions are now well known, although utilitarianism still dominates public economics. We review the recent interest that has arisen for broadening the normative approach and making...

Commodities communicate. Consumers choose a consumption bundle both for its intrinsic characteristics and for what this bundle communicates about their qualities (or 'identity') to spectators. We investigate optimal indirect taxation when consumption choices are motivated by two sorts of...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the implications of increased student mobility on the level of education provided after opening the borders between two similar countries. As a preliminary result, it will be shown that some public provision of mandatory education can be welfare improving...

This paper studies the design of the optimal non linear taxation in an economy where longevity varies across agents, and depends on three factors: longevity genes, health investment and farsightedness. Provided earnings, farsightedness and genes are correlated, governmental intervention can be...

This paper provides a model of nonlinear income taxation in a context of international mobility. We consider two identical countries, in which each government chooses non-cooperatively redistributive taxes. It is shown that when skilled workers can move at low cost, the income taxation does not...

This paper studies how congestion in the public health sector can be used as a redistributive tool. In our model, agents differ in income and they can obtain a health service either from a congested public hospital or from a non congested private one at a higher price. With pure in-kind...

We study a model in which asymmetric regions compete for capital with both public investments and taxes. Public investments are chosen in the first stage, and then source income taxes are set in the second stage. Public investments increase the productivity of capital and they also serve to...

This paper reexamines the work of Kempf and Rota-Graziosi (J. Pub. Econ. 94: 768-776, 2010), which shows that leadership by the small region is the risk dominant equilibrium under the endogenous timing game. They obtain this result in a model where the asymmetry among countries translates into...

We investigate the effectiveness of tax and transfer policies in correcting market distortions when the economy is imperfectly competitive. We perform this analysis in the context of an exchange model representing a bilateral oligopoly situation, which constitutes a particular example of a...