Decentralisation is invariably among the recommendations that international organisations such as the World Bank make for an enhancement of social provisions, and particularly a better targeting of social assistance regimes, in Eastern and Central Europe. However, theoretical literature as wel...

We investigate how income inequality affects social welfare in a model of voluntary contributions to multiple pure public goods. Itaya, de Meza, and Myles (1997) show that the maximization of social welfare precludes income equality in a single pure public good model. In contrast, we show that...

This paper illustrates how Crossing Generalised Lorenz (GL) curves can be used to identify the best income distribution on social welfare grounds within a set of alternative income distributions generated by different policy options. It starts by illustrating two alternative income distributions...

In the US, defense R&D share of GDP has decreased significantly since 1960. To analyze the implications on economic growth and welfare, we develop an R&D-based growth model that features the commonly discussed crowding-out and spillover effects of defense R&D on civilian R&D. The model also...

We show how normative standpoints determine optimal taxation of wealth. Since wealth is not equal to capital, we find very different welfare implications of land rent-, bequest- and capital taxation. It is mainly land rents that should be taxed. We develop an overlapping generations model with...

This paper reexamines the design of the optimal lockdown strategy by paying attention to its robustness to the postulated social welfare criterion. We first characterize optimal lockdown under utilitarianism, and we show that this social criterion can, under some conditions, imply a COVID-19...

We consider a world in which countries apply optimal taxes on mobile capital and savings (like in Bucovetsky and Wilson, 1991). Firms and savers may underreport income in order to avoid or evade taxation. We show that, even in the presence of underreporting, the equilibrium under tax competition...

We show that the presence of a strategic tax policy increases the incentive for a horizontal merger compared to the situation with no tax policy. Thus, we point towards a new factor, viz., strategic tax policy, for increasing the incentive for a horizontal merger that has been ignored in the...

This paper analyzes the effects of introducing a graduated minimum wage in a model with optimal income taxation in which a government seeks to maximize social welfare. It shows that the optimal graduated minimum wage increases social welfare by increasing the low-productivity workers’...