The literature on public goods has shown that efficient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions efficiency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay...

Many economic and political decisions are the outcome of strategic contests for a given prize. The nature of such contests can be determined by a designer who is driven by political considerations with a specific political culture. The main objective of this study is to analyze the effect of...

The Mirrleesian model of income taxation restricts attention to simple allocation mechanism with no strategic interdependence, i.e., the optimal labor supply of any one individual does not depend on the labor supply of others. It has been argued by Piketty (1993) that this restriction is...

We study a large economy model in which individuals have private information about their productive abilities and their preferences. Moreover, there is aggregate uncertainty so that the social benefits from taxation and public goods provision are a priori unknown. The analysis is based on a...

We completely characterize the set of second-best optimal "menus" of student-loan contracts in a simple economy with risky labour-market outcomes, adverse selection, moral hazard and risk aversion. The model combines structured student loans and an elementary optimal income-tax problem à la...

In a market in which sellers compete for heterogeneous buyers by posting mechanisms, we analyze how the properties of the meeting technology affect the allocation of buyers to sellers. We show that a separate submarket for each type of buyer is the efficient outcome if and only if meetings are...

We propose a smooth multibidding mechanism for environments where a group of agents have to choose one out of several projects. Our proposal is related to the multibidding mechanism (Pérez-Castrillo and Wettstein, 2002) but it is "smoother" in the sense that small variations in an agent's bids...

Digital media goods and digital media platforms exhibit cost structures and network effects that imply that price and quantity effects of consumption taxes are qualitatively different compared to what we typically find for physical goods. For instance, in most European countries and US states,...

This paper investigates the impact of restrictive TBTs on firms' extensive margins (export participation and exit probability), intensive margins (export value) and pricing strategy (export price). To this end, product-level restrictive TBTs and firm-level export are combined and an...