This paper provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of Pareto-improving tax reforms. The conditions can be expressed as sufficient statistics and have a wide range of potential applications in public finance. We discuss one such application in detail: the introduction of...

This paper studies the tax treatment of couples. We develop two different ap-proaches. One is tailored to the analysis of tax systems that stick to the principle that the tax base for couples is the sum of their incomes. One is tailored to the analysis of reforms toward individual taxation. We...

This paper studies a large majority election with voters who have heterogeneous, private preferences and exogenous private signals. We show that a Bayesian persuader can implement any state-contingent outcome in some equilibrium by providing additional information. In this setting, without the...

A uniform price for carbon is at the center of market-based approaches to climate policy. Actual climate policy, by contrast, has many sector-specific rules. This paper studies the desirability of the market-based approach using tools from the theory of taxation. It is found that a justification...

This article establishes versions of Moulin's (Public Choice 35:437-455, 1980) characterizations of various classes of strategy-proof social choice functions when the domain consists of all profiles of single-peaked preferences on an arbitrary subset of the real line. Two results are established...

We develop a model of political competition with endogenous turnout and endogenous platforms. Parties trade off incentivizing their supporters to vote and discouraging the supporters of the competing party from voting. We show that the latter objective is particularly pronounced for a party with...

Mediation is a dispute resolution process whereby agents reach a mutually acceptable agreement among different proposals that satisfy a set of principles. This paper provides a natural way of coming to such agreements in claims problems. In our approach, mediation combines (i) a set of fair...

The problem of social choice is studied on a domain with countably many individuals. In contrast to most of the existing literature which establish either non-constructive possibilities or approximate (i.e. invisible) dictators, we show that if one adds a continuity property to the usual set of...

This paper studies the problem of burden sharing in countries that were forced to introduce severe budget cuts after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 which had unleashed a financial crisis in many industrialised countries of the Western world. We do not ask how the burden was actually...

In a model where individuals differ in both their health care needs and their lifestyle preferences, we examine the fair provision of health care when those who regret their initial decisions are granted a fresh start. By considering that each agent chooses how to allocate a given amount of...