In this paper, we examine whether a minimum level of ensured consumption from a social safety net has the potential of breaking the vicious circle of risk avoidance and low return in African agriculture. We study how the implementation of a social safety net programme in Ethiopia has affected...

This thesis consists of a summary and four self-contained papers. Paper [I] examines whether the implementation of a social safety net programme in Ethiopia has affected the value, risk and composition of farmers’ crop portfolios. The empirical analysis suggests that the value and risk of the...

Earlier literature on tax competition and policy coordination typically assumes that the labor market is competitive; a description less suitable for Europe, where trade unions have had a strong position in the labor market for a long time. This paper concerns factor income taxation and public...

This thesis consists of four papers: two of them deal with the relationship between consumption, energy taxation, and emissions on macro level, and two of them focus on the effects of changes in consumption and income on the environmental quality on a micro level. <p> The main objective of paper...</p>

This paper shows how the first-best and second-best rules for optimal public good provision depend on the adaptation to private and public consumption. Adaptation in private consumption typically leads to over-provision relative to the Samuelson condition, while adaptation in public consumption...

This paper re-examines the question of whether federal ex-post redistribution in terms of public funds leads to under-provision of public goods by adding the assumption that the member states are free to leave the economic federation. We show that federal ex-post redistribution no longer...

A significant part of the revenue in the EU budget is raised via a GNI-based resource. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how this way of raising funds to the central authority in an economic federation affects the tax policy implemented by the lower level jurisdictions. This question is...

This paper analyzes optimal differential commodity taxation, together with optimal nonlinear income taxation, in order to deal with positional preferences. It also derives the optimal public provision of private goods both when differential commodity taxation is feasible and when it is not. It...

This paper deals with optimal income taxation and relative consumption under a welfarist government that fully respects people’s preferences and a paternalist government that does not share the consumer preference for relative consumption. Consistent with previous findings, relative...

Previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure comparisons. This paper considers a two-type optimal nonlinear income tax model where people care both about their relative consumption and their relative leisure. Increased consumption...