There are two main approaches for defining social welfare relations for an economy with infinite horizon. The first one is to consider the set of intertemporal utility streams generated by a general set of bounded consumptions and define a preference relation between them. This relation is...

This paper inverts the usual logic of applied optimal income taxation. It starts from the observed distribution of income before and after redistribution and corresponding marginal tax rates. Under a set of simplifying assumptions, it is then possible to recover the social welfare function that...

This paper inverts the usual logic of applied optimal income taxation. It starts from the observed distribution of income before and after redistribution and corresponding marginal tax rates. Under a set of simplifying assumptions, it is then possible to recover the social welfare function that...

This paper presents the Paretian Watershed and the fundamental theorems of welfare economics. It distinguishes the British approach (à la Kaldor-Hicks) from the American approach (à la Bergson-Samuelson) to new welfare economics. It develops the more recent domains of happiness economics, the...

There is no consensus yet on the correct way to write the social utility function in presence of paternalistic altruism. This note shows that the speci cation of the central planner objective is crucial for optimal capital intensity and optimal growth in a one and a two-sector models. In a...

In this paper, we propose a definition of Edgeworth equilibrium for a private ownership production economy with (possibly infinitely) many private goods and a finite number of pure public goods. We show that Edgeworth equilibria exist whatever be the dimension of the private goods space, and can...

In a simple public good economy, we propose a natural bargaining procedure whose equilibria converge to Lindahl allocations as the cost of bargaining vanishes. The procedure splits the decision over the allocation in a decision about personalized prices and a decision about output levels for the...

Unlike partial equilibrium analysis which study the equilibrium of a particular market under the clause "ceteris paribus" that revenues and prices on the other markets stay approximately unaffected, the ambition of a general equilibrium model is to analyze the simultaneous equilibrium in all...

The body of literature on purely democratic countries can sometimes fail to explain the behavior of government in semi-democratic African countries. Empirical and theoretical political economic papers find that public funds target ruling party supporters and swing districts. Our results,...

A vast recent literature has stressed social fragmentation's negative impact on the provision of public goods. This is a key issue, given that public goods availability has been reckoned as crucial to economic development, while developing countries' societies often exhibit high degrees of...