We examine two types of altruism and their implications for voluntary giving. Philanthropists are altruists who wish to enhance the well-being of others, while individuals with merit-good preferences only wish to further the consumption of certain merit goods by others. Philanthropic donors...

This note provides an alternative proof for the equivalence of decreasing absolute prudence (DAP) in the expected utility framework and in a two-parametric approach where utility is a function of the mean and the standard deviation. In addition, we elucidate that the equivalence of DAP and the...

We analyse tax competition with corporate profit taxes in a common market where tax revenues are allocated according to an apportionment formula. As a general rule, tax competition is sharper the higher is the tax elasticity of the apportionment formula which, in turn, depends on the properties...

Critical-level (CL) utilitarianism with both fixed and variable critical levels is applied to the problem of redistribution in a federation with free mobility. We are interested in intra-regional inequality when redistribution policies are organized decentrally in a federation. Due to free...

We model a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system as a series of incomplete intergenerational contracts. Each generation pays a pension to its parents as the price for a premortal transferral of economic property rights. The terms of this intergenerational trade are fixed in a social contract,...

The paper analyzes the impact of personal income taxes on strategic business taxation. It sets up a model of tax competition between small jurisdictions whose governments are revenue maximizers and use business taxes on the capital stock and on corporate profits as their policy instruments....