This paper aims at investigating whether or not a utilitarian social planner should subsidize longevity-enhancing expenditures in an economy with a PAYG pension system. For that purpose, a simple two-period OLG model is developed, in which the length of the second period of life can be raised by...

Most work on tax competition argues that mobile factors tend to be undertaxed except if there is coordination of tax policies. Full coordination is not however always feasible, and as a consequence some measures of partial coordination have been proposed such as minimal witholding taxes on...

We consider a model where creating a charity implies a fixed cost and individual contributions depend on how close donors feel with respect to the charity. In that setting we show that there are an optimal number of charities and an optimal rate of subsidization that depend on the set-up cost...

In this paper we study the optimal design of a long term care policy in a setting that includes three types of care to dependent parents: public nursing homes, financial assistance by children and assistance in time by children. The instruments are public nursing homes and subsidies to aiding...

Existing models of hospital financing advocate mixed schemes which include both lump-sum and cost-based payments. The doctor is generally the unique decision maker, which is unrealistic in a hospital setting where both managers and doctors are involved. This paper develops a model in which...

The literature on the use of differential commodity taxes/subsidies and that on quantity controls to supplement income taxation have developed separately from each other. The purpose of this paper is to combine these two strands in the standard framework of optimal non-linear income taxation. We...

One of the pervasive problems with means-tested public long term care (LTC) programs is their inability to prevent individuals who could afford private long term services from taking advantage of public care. They often manage to elude the means-test net through “strategic impoverishment”....

This paper analyzes the impact of aging on capital accumulation and welfare in a country with a sizable unfunded social security system. Using a two-period overlapping-generation model with endogenous retirement decisions, we show that both the type of aging and the type of unfunded social...

We provide an explanation for why estate taxation is surprisingly little used over the world, given the skewness of the estate distribution. Taxing estates implies meddling with intra-family decisions, which may be frown upon by many. At the same time, the concentration of estates means that a...

The Atkinson-Stiglitz Theorem shows that with weakly separable preferences, differential commod- ity taxes are not needed if an optimal nonlinear income tax is imposed. Redistributive objectives can be achieved with the income tax alone even if goods differ considerably in their income...