This paper shows that the public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals have relative consumption concerns. By providing private goods, governments directly intervene in the consumption structure, and thereby have an instrument...

In business and politics, gifts are often aimed at influencing the recipient at the expense of third parties. In an experimental study, which removes informational and incentive confounds, subjects strongly respond to small gifts even though they understand the gift giver’s intention. Our...

In this paper we examine how Finnish municipalities' expenditures depend on the share of citizens with foreign background out of the total population. Empirical analyses make use of Finnish panel data from 295 municipalities and 202 migrant nationalities for the period 1987- 2018. It turns out...

This study examines whether the fiscal multiplier can be negative for certain types of government spending. The key result is that the fiscal multiplier can be negative if there is a high degree of substitutability between private and government consumption and government consumption is...

I analyse the welfare impact of a mixed market with a public or private firm with some degree of altruism, in the presence of an agency problem. Contrary to some earlier findings, the total surplus turns out to be increasing in the degree of altruism. This impact is stronger than if there is no...

Incentives to invest in higher education are affected by both the direct wage effect of human capital investments and the indirect wage effect resulting from lower unemployment risks and shorter spells in unemployment associated with higher educated. We analyse the returns to education in...