We use hedonic prices and purchase quantities to consider what can be learned about household willingness to pay for baskets of organic products and how this varies across households. We use rich scanner data on food purchases by a large number of households to compute household specific lower...

The Paper reviews the literature on these tax incentives, with special focus on long-term saving, housing, and household liabilities. The Paper addresses several areas of policy intervention: (1) the interest rate effect on personal saving; (2) the effect of tax incentives on long-term mandatory...

Recent evidence suggests that individuals do not always take notice of tax attributes when making their choices. This paper focuses on the case of tax relief for charitable contributions. Although a fully rational donor should view a matched payment to the receiving charity and a tax rebate of...

The theoretical literature suggests that taxation can have a large impact on household portfolio selection and allocation. In this Paper we consider the tax treatment of life insurance, considering the cancellation of tax incentives in Italian life insurance contracts for investors with high...

Before 1992 mortgage interest in Italy was fully tax deductible up to 3,500 euro (7,000 for two cosigners). Between 1992-94 the government implemented a series of tax reforms whose ultimate effect was to cancel the relation between the after-tax mortgage rate and the marginal tax rate. Using...

We study the effects of German unification on macroeconomic variables in a model with capital accumulation, skill differences and a welfare state. The integration of two economies differing in capital holdings and skill distribution is similar to a mass migration of low-skilled agents holding no...

King-Fullerton methodology cannot assess the minimum-asset tax (MAT) because it cannot handle uncertainty. We present an alternative based on option pricing, and show how carry-over rules, depreciation conventions and uncertainty affect the MAT burden. Using Brazilian data, we show that: (a)...

This paper examines the determinants of airport aeronautical charges by employing a unique panel dataset covering sixty-one European airports over an eighteen-year period. We are able to extend the literature on the role of airports as an essential element in transport infrastructure by offering...

How have house prices evolved in the long-run? This paper presents annual house price indices for 14 advanced economies since 1870. Based on extensive data collection, we are able to show for the first time that house prices in most industrial economies stayed constant in real terms from the...

This paper surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between the spatial distribution of economic activity and transportation costs. We develop a multi-region model of economic geography that we use to understand the general equilibrium implications of transportation...