We study how the optimal public provision of health care depends on whether or not individuals have an option to seek publicly financed treatment in other regions. We find that, relative to the first-best solution, the government has an incentive to over-provide health care to low-income...

This thesis consists of a summary and four papers. The first two concerns health care and sickness absence, and the last two pharmaceutical costs and prices. <p> Paper [I] presents an economic federation model which resembles the situation in, for example, Sweden. In the model the state governments...</p>

This paper addresses vertical fiscal externalities in a model where the state governments provide health care and the federal government provides a sickness benefit. Both levels of government tax labor income and policy decisions affect labor income as well as participation in the labor market....

In this paper, we analyze the welfare effects of publicly provided health care in an economy where the consumers have "present-biased" preferences due to quasi-hyperbolic discounting. The analysis is based on a two-type model with asymmetric information between the government and the private...

There is a rich literature analyzing the problems that will arise as the share of elderly and retired in the population increases in the near future. However, the locational decisions among the elderly as well as their implications in terms of taxes/transfers and of allocation of...

This paper concerns municipal preferences for state imposed municipal amalgamations. The main purpose of the paper is to study what factors that can explain municipal acceptance or objection of a state imposed amalgamation decision. The empirical analysis is based on the extensive municipal...

This thesis consists of a summary and four self-contained papers. <p> Paper [I] Following the 1987 report by The World Commission on Environment and Development, the genuine saving has come to play a key role in the context of sustainable development, and the World Bank regularly publishes numbers...</p>

This paper concerns optimal income taxation in a two-country OLG economy, where each country is characterized by asymmetric information between the government and the private sector, and where one of the countries outsources part of its production to the other. In the country whose firms...

This paper concerns optimal taxation and environmental policy in the presence of transboundary environmental damage and labour market distortions, where the latter gives rise to wage bargaining externalities between countries. I consider a decentralized economic federation where the federal...

This paper concerns the optimal provision of a state-variable public good, where the global climate is the prime example. The analysis is based on a two-type optimal income tax model with overlapping generations, where people care about their relative consumption. We consider both...