This paper presents a political economy approach to payroll tax competition between countries adopting different systems of social insurance.

We assume a population of infinitely-lived households of the economy split into two groups : one with a high discount factor (the patient) and one with a low one (the impatient). The environmental quality is deteriorated by firm's polluting emissions. The governmental policy consists in...

Theoretical models of government formation in political science usually assume that the head of state in non-strategic. In this paper, we analyze the power of an agenda setter who chooses the order in which players are recognized to form coalitions in simple games.

Using the spatial theory of voting, this paper describes an institutional structure where there are two branches of the government: the executive, elected by plurality rule, and the legislative elected by proportional rule. The resulting policy outcome is described through a compromise between...

Purely non-cooperative principles, as itereted dominance and backward induction, explain divided government.

This paper studies the incidence of tax-transfer policy in a growth model wherein individuals differ according to their level of intergenerational altruism and have an endogenous labor supply. The main results is that public debt is neutral at the macro level but redistributes resources from...

We consider social insurance schemes with a two-part benefit formula: a flat (constant) term and a variable term which is proportional to individuals' contributions. The factor of proportionality defines the type of social insurance. We adopt a two-stage political economy approach. At the first,...

In this paper, we study the welfare effects of monetary policy in a simple overlapping generation economy in which agents voluntary contribute to a public good. Inflation has two effects at equilibrium: it increases voluntary contributions and it misallocates private consumption across time. We...

The paper deals with a cooperative game theory analysis of the economics of international agreements on climate change.

The Atkinson-Stiglitz Theorem shows that with weakly separable preferences, differential commod- ity taxes are not needed if an optimal nonlinear income tax is imposed. Redistributive objectives can be achieved with the income tax alone even if goods differ considerably in their income...