In this methodological paper, we prove that the key tax competition game introduced by Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986) and Wildasin (1988), extended to asymmetric regions, possesses a Nash equilibrium under several assumptions commonly adopted in the literature : goods are supposed to be normal ;...

In France, since 2001, home care for disabled elderly can be partially subsidized by a public allowance (allocation personnalisée d'autonomie - APA). For eligible elderly people, the amount to be paid for one hour of formal home care depends on their income, according to a national rule, but...

We study the testability implications of public versus private consumption. The distinguishing feature of our approach is that we start from a revealed preference characterization of collectively rational behavior. Remarkably, we find that assumptions regarding the public or private nature of...

We provide a necessary condition for optimal commodity taxes when agents differ according to labor skill and consumption tastes and when the government can also use a general nonlinear tax on labor income. The discouragement index of commodities in shown to be the sum of (1) the distributive...

International differences in fuel taxation are huge, and may be justified by different local negative externalities that taxes must correct, as well as by different preferences for public spending. In this context, should a worldwide unique carbon tax be added to these local taxes to correct the...

Random taxation may be optimal when the taxpayers differ in their attitudes towards risk, so that tax randomization enables the government to relax the incentive constraints. The paper provides a necessary and sufficient condition for local random deviations to be welfare improving in a...

This note characterizes the optimal base for commodity taxation in the presence of administrative fixed costs varying across goods. For low tax rates, the optimal base comprises all commodities whose discouragement index is greater than the ratio of their administrative costs to the tax they yield.

An optimal contract may involve randomization when the agents differ in their attitudes towards risk, so that randomization enables the principal to relax the incentive constraints. The paper provides a necessary and sufficient condition for local random deviations to be welfare improving in a...

There exists a large consensus in the economic literature and in the economic institutions about the legitimacy of policies subsidizing education. This legitimacy lies in the fact that education is a source of positive externalities. In a standard framework of endogenous fertility, the present...

I show in this paper that in an overlapping generations economy with production à la Diamond (1970) in which the agents can only save in terms of capital (i.e. with not asset bubbles à la Tirole (1985) or public debt as in Diamond (1965)), there is a period-by-period balanced fiscal policy...