This paper provides a simple general equilibrium model with productive public spending and distorting taxes. The optimal conditions for the provision of public inputs are obtained under different tax systems. Also we discuss which factors affect the marginal cost of public funds.

A new method of empirically computing the macroeconomic returns to public investment is proposed. Pereira's (2000) technique is modified, and a measure which accounts for both public and private investment costs is suggested. An empirical application to US data shows that differences between...

This paper studies the effects of environmental policy on the farmer's soil optimal management. We consider a dynamic economic model of soil erosion where the intensity use of inputs allows the farmer to control soil losses. Inputs use induces a pollution which is accentuated by the soil...

Goods are often allocated publically by means of queuing processes in developing countries. In such situations, which group of citizens should a corrupt government official favor? In addition, what should be the basis for this favoritism? To the best of our knowledge, these salient questions...

The purpose of this note is to correct an error in the seminal article on secession by Buchanan and Faith (1987). In their paper, Buchanan and Faith neglected the effect of political separation affects on markets, and consequently on individual private incomes.

We show by a simple example that in a public goods economy consisting of identical individuals with symmetric Cobb-Douglas preferences the core of the economy does not con-verge to the Lindahl solution when the number of agents goes to infinity. This confirms in an elementary way that the...

This paper investigates the causes of municipalities secession in Brazil. We develop a model where the median voter decides on the creation of new municipalities observing the trade-off between loss of scale on public production and increase in federal transfers to his/her municipality. Voters...

In this note we propose the artificial neural networks for measuring efficiency as a complementary tool to the common techniques of the efficiency literature. In the application to the public sector we find that the neural network allows to conclude more robust results to rank decision-making units.

Since 1969 more than a dozen studies have explored the grossly unequal state-level distribution of New Deal spending. Why did small population rural states such as Nevada, Montana, and Wyoming receive up to six times as many federal dollars per capita as densely populated states such as...

This note applies insights from a famous problem in price theory, "Shipping the Good Apples Out," to expand the comparative static predictions of the model of monetary donations and volunteering developed by Andreoni, Gale and Scotz (1996). we show that the Hicksian supply of volunteering may be...