Using the self-selection framework developed by Stiglitz (1982, 1987) and Stern (1982), the paper reconsiders the issue of the desirability of public provision of private goods in a simple two-class economy where wages are endogenous and the policymaker has access to what is commonly known as...

Nonlinear income taxes and linear commodity taxes are analyzed when people differ with respect to ability, high-skill agents have heterogeneous preferences, and neither individual abilities nor preferences are observable. We characterize pure income tax optima, which may be bunching or...

Pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension schemes are becoming increasingly unsustainable in the face of drastic population aging. Simultaneously, the contribution rates may aggravate an already serious unemployment problem. A regime switch to a funded system could help to alleviate the unemployment problem...

This paper examines an international mixed model in which a domestic state-owned welfare-maximizing public firm competes against a foreign labor-managed income-per-worker-maximizing private firm. In the first stage, each firm independently decides whether or not to make a commitment to capacity....

We study voting over higher-education finance in an economy with two regions and two separated labor markets. Households differ in their financial endowment and their children's ability. Nonstudents are immobile. Students decide where to study; they return home after graduation with exogenous...

The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic treatment of tax policies in mixed markets with endogenous entry. We consider three types of tax-subsidy policies: a simple unit subsidy, an entry-license tax, and a policy mixture of the two instruments. Under the unit-subsidy policy, in...

This study analyzes how commitment to a deficit ceiling can affect private agents´ political efforts, as well as overall welfare, in a hard- and a soft-budget regime, using a two-period model simulating a present and a future generation and a government. In the hard-budget regime, the...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of a publicly provided private good with long-term consequences for individual well-being, in an economy where consumers have present-biased preferences due to quasihyperbolic discounting. The analysis is based on a two-type model with asymmetric...

Do university graduates pay back the public subsidies which they received as students through higher income taxes? Assuming a life cycle version of the ability-to-pay-principle of taxation as the normative foundation, we suggest the "foregone smoothing benefit" concept (FSB) in order to obtain a...

This paper examines the behaviors of a profit-maximizing private firm and a socialwelfare- maximizing public firm in a mixed market model with a lifetime employment contract as a strategic commitment. The paper then shows that there exists an equilibrium in which the private firm enters into a...