Nationalekonomiska metoder och modeller tillämpas inom de mest skiftande områden som kriminalitet, barnuppfostran och drogmissbruk. Ett skäl till ämnets framgång är dess användning av matematik. Nationalekonomins formalisering synes dock även ha inneburit insnävade beteendeantaganden...

This paper revisits old questions of the proper subject and bounds of economics: Does economics study “provisioning”? or markets? or a method of reasoning, self-interested rational optimization? A variety of scholars and others in many fields make use of a taxonomy of society consisting of...

A number of competing social preference models have been developed inspired by the evidence from economic experiments. We test the relative performance of some of these models using an experimental design that is aimed at capturing pure distributional concerns in a multi-person setting. We find...

This paper concerns optimal income taxation under asymmetric information in a two-type overlapping generations model, where people care about their relative consumption compared to others. The appearance of positional concerns affects the policy choices via two channels: (i) the size of the...

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...

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...

The optimal provision of a state-variable public good, where the global climate is the prime example, is analyzed in a model where people care about their relative consumption. We consider both keeping-up-with-the-Joneses preferences (where people compare their own current consumption with...

We derive an optimal airport-pricing model, both with and without a constraint on the revenues, that includes all relevant external marginal costs,. Given the results of the model we discuss the implications on the profit of airports, and find that given that the proceeds of the environmental...

We analyze how habit formation affects optimal environmental taxation, when consumption of a habitual good causes a negative external effect on the environment. In a simple two-period model, we show that optimal taxation is still Pigouvian, where tax rates equal marginal damage in each period....

Gold is frequently mined in rainforests that can provide either gold or forest benefits, but not both. This conflict in resource use occurs in Ghana, a developing country in the tropics where the capital needed for mining is obtained from foreign direct investment (FDI). We use a dynamic model...