A premature death unexpectedly brings a life and a career to their end, leading to substantial welfare losses. We study the retirement decision in an economy with risky lifetime, and compare the laissez-faire with egalitarian social optima. We consider two social objectives: (1) the maximin on...

The built environment plays a key role in the strategy of “Aging in Place”. Here, we study the influence of the built environment on the health status of elderly people living in Brussels. Using census and geocoded data, we analysed if built environment factors were associated with poor...

We apply the theory of inequality in opportunity to measure inequity in mortality. Our empirical work is based on a rich dataset for the Netherlands (1998-2007), linking information about mortality, health events and lifestyles. We show that distinguishing between different channels via which...

We discuss the conceptual foundations of measuring (in)equity in health and health care. After an overview of the recent developments in the measurement of socio-economic inequalities and in racial disparities, we show how these partial approaches can be seen as special cases of the more general...

We study how political boundaries and tax competition among jurisdictions interact with the labor and land markets to determine the economic structure and performance of metropolitan areas. Contrary to general belief, institutional fragmentation and cross-border commuting need not be...

Redistributive taxation under uncertainty has two functions: not only the redistribution of income across individuals who are ex ante different but also the sharing of risk between them. The economic integration of factor markets changes the distribution of income within each country, and so the...

This paper analyzes the role of yardstick competition for improving political decisions. We examine how performance comparisons across jurisdictions affect the agency problem resulting from uncertainty about politicians (adverse selection) and their policies (moral hazard). We study two forms of...

This paper presents a spatial model of a city with two unequally productive jurisdictions. City residents bear a commuting cost to work in either of the two jurisdictions. In each jurisdiction, a fixed public budget must be financed with a wage tax and a head-tax. We compare the first best...

The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of tolling road use on a parallel road network where each link can be tolled by a different government. Using both theoreticaland numericalmo dels, the paper analyses the potential tax competition between countries that each maximise the surplus...

The purpose of this paper is to compare the interaction between pricing and capacity decisions on simple serial and parallel transport networks. When individual links of the network are operated by different regional or national authorities, toll and capacity competition is likely to result....