When the government makes a grant to a private charitable organization, does it displace private giving? This is one of the fundamental policy questions in public finance, and much theoretical and empirical research has been devoted to understanding the relationship between private donations and...

This paper analyses the long-run effects of Estonia’s 2000 Income Tax Act with a dynamic general equilibrium model. Specifically, we consider the impact of the shift from an imputation system to one where companies only pay taxes on distributed profits. Balanced growth paths, transitional...

There is a secret paradox at the heart of social contract theories. Such theories assume that, because personal security and private property are at risk in a state of nature, subjects will agree to grant Leviathan a monopoly of violence. But what is to prevent Leviathan from turning on his...

Traditionally, national governance and corruption challenges have been seen as: i) particularly daunting in the poorer countries, with the richer world viewed as exemplary; ii) anchored within a legalistic framework and focused on formal institutions, iii) a challenge within public sectors, and,...

What determines the wealth of nations? If anyone knew the answer to that question, no-one would have heard of Adam Smith as an economist, and for that matter all economists. Economics is really the study of wealth creation under scarcity. The reason economists and others have a hard time pinning...

Nous étudions l'impact des regroupements municipaux survenus au Québec entre 1992 et 1999 sur les taux de taxation effectifs et la valeur marchande des propriétés résidentielles. Nous montrons que l'effet d'un regroupement sur ces deux volets de la vie municipale est indéterminé....

This paper presents estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources...

The Easterlin Paradox refers to the fact that happiness data are typically stationary in spite of considerable increases in income. This amounts to a rejection of the hypothesis that current income is the only argument in the utility function. One possible answer is that human development...

This paper analyzes the effects of public subsidies on R&D expenditure in the German manufacturing sector. The focus is on the question whether public R&D funding stimulates or crowds out private investment. Cross sectional data at the firm level is used. By applying parametric and...

This work builds a macro model for livestock farming based on aggregation of initial micro description for rational control of total number of vintage livestock (age cohorts). All variety of animal kinds is reduced to one by given recount coefficients. An optimal problem on co-hort total number...