Many public goods generate utility only when combined with a time-input. Important examples include road networks and publicly provided leisure facilities. If it is possible to charge for the time spent using the public good it is generally a second-best Pareto optimal policy to do so even in...

Population aging will impose a significant burden on European pay-as-you-go pension systems. This study presents an estimate of this burden for the four largest euro-area countries and assesses alternative reform approaches. With prudent and realistic assumptions, the present value of future...

The cost-effective public provision of high-quality goods and services is crucial for long-term growth. We study the determinants of public-sector efficiency (PSE) and in particular the role of citizens´ political values. Indeed, we argue that citizens´ willingness to monitor public affairs is...

The literature on long-term relationships in public finance is dominated by two approaches: fiscal sustainability and Wagner´s law. In this paper, we argue that they should be analyzed simultaneously, using vector error-correction models for public expenditures, revenues, and GDP. For Germany,...

There is no consistent notion of country size in the literature on the voluntary provision of an international public good. This paper suggests preference-adjusted GNP as a useful index of size. Defining a country s size in that manner, contributing countries are unambiguously larger than free...

This paper presents a general-equilibrium model of a small open economy, in which the production process of private goods generates pollution, and the government finances the production cost of a public consumption good through revenue from tariffs and pollution taxes. Since a variety of...

We experimentally investigate the gap between willingness to pay and willingness to donate in the context of the promotion of green electricity. The experiment involves two differing scenarios (public choice versus individual choice) and two distinct public payment vehicles (direct tax versus...

Introducing a threshold in the sense of a minimal project size transforms a public-good game with an inefficient equilibrium into a coordination game with a set of Pareto-superior equilibria. Thresholds may therefore improve efficiency in the voluntary provision of public goods. In our one-shot...

We follow Wellisch (1994) in examining the efficiency of regional policymaking in a model with interregional spillovers and in which individuals are attached to regions for cultural reasons. In addition, we assume that regions desire to maintain their social cohesion. We postulate that regional...

During the last three decades there has been an almost continuous undermining of the public interest by private interests operating either outside or inside Greek public administration. The result of this infiltration has been a gradual loss of bureaucratic autonomy to pursue the public...