In the last twenty years economics has created much of lasting value and real potential: it has been a very fertile period. But economics has also suffered from what I shall term „collective amnesia? covering whole areas of public policy. And on policy and the role of government it has,...

This paper investigates the private provision of public goods in segregated societies. While most research agrees that segregation undermines public provision, the findings are mixed for private provision: social interactions, being strong within groups and limited across groups, may either...

We propose a two dimensional infinite horizon model of public consumption in which investments are decided by a winner-take-all election. Investments in the two public goods create a linkage across periods and parties have different specialities. We show that the incumbent party vote share...

We develop and apply a new method for estimating the economic benefits of an environmental amenity. The method fits within the household production framework (Becker 1965), and is based upon the notion of estimating the derived demand for a privately traded option to utilize a freely-available...

This paper analyzes the private provision of public goods where consumers interact within a fixed network structure and may benefit only from their direct neighbors’ provisions. We present a proof for existence and uniqueness of a Nash equilibrium with general best-reply functions. Our...

The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...

Socially responsible investment in analyzed in a general equilibrium context. This is important in order to understand the ultimate consequences of SRI on the decisions of economic agents. Building on models by Brock (1982) and Merton (1987), SRI is modelled as the choice to voluntarily give up...

In this article we apply and extend the model elaborated by Acemoglu and Verdier in their seminal paper (2000), to examine how the economy represented in their theoretical framework responds to an exogenous change in the agent's incentive. In particular, we focus on the consequences of a famous...