Defense spending accounts for a large share of the budget in many countries, but the value of the resulting public good - national defense - has so far escaped assessment. Much of the literature has instead considered indirect benefits of defense spending in terms of greater economic growth or...

I derive values of marginal changes in a public good for two-person households, measured alternatively by household member is̕ willingness to pay (WTP) for the good on behalf of the household, WTPi(H), or by the sum of individual WTP values across family members, WTP(C). Households are assumed...

We study the heterogeneity of preferences regarding the limited substitutability of environmental public goods vis-a-vis private consumption goods and how it affects the economic valuation of environmental public goods. We show theoretically that mean marginal willingness to pay for an...

Traditional economic models of vaccination behavior simply assume that agents free-ride on the vaccination decisions of others. We provide three different models of private provision of a public good, such as a joint production model and a conjectural variation model, to explain how a positive...

Empirical evidence is provided for the importance of non-reciprocal pro-social behavior of individuals in an anonymous, n-person pure public good setting. A unique panel data set of 136,000 observations is matched with an extensive survey. Even under anonymous conditions, a large number of...

We construct a general equilibrium model of a two-country trading block where governments through tax policies attract mobile capital, and provide an imported public consumption good. At Nash equilibrium, when the public good is under-provided, (i) a country with a large GDP, has a large Nash...