The challenges we face in our economies and societies in our divided unsustainable world are perhaps greater than at any other time. These challenges have arisen because of how we have been trained to think, plan and act as individuals and how we have applied this training to the way we organise...

This dissertation treats the topic of environmentally unfriendly consumption behaviour in relation to air pollution and the use of automobiles in Mexico City by analyzing three related aspects: i) relevant factors of driving patterns, ii) differences in the extent of pollution arising from...

Modern advances give us the ability to re-engineer the taxation system to benefit from computerized automation and the insights of modern psychology. People like to do things that bring a tangible reward. Tax-paying should be made FUN, not a chore. You will want to participate if you perceive a...

This paper compares the stochastic behavior of fiscal variables under optimal fiscal policy for the cases of full commitment by the government (Ramsey problem) and no commitment by the government (focusing on differentiable Markov perfect equilibrium). It shows that the cyclical properties of...

This paper investigates household decisions, and optimal taxation in an overlapping generations model in which individual utility depends on a weighted average of consumption of ones peers --- a ``keeping up with the Joneses'' consumption externality. In contrast to representative agent...

Conspicuous consumption is a signaling device used to allocate non-market goods (i.e. goods that cannot be traded in markets). In sharp contrast to the existing literature, in our model people do not want to signal wealth but some unobservable traits that, conditional on other observable...

This work intends to specify a formula for the optimal taxation in Probabilistic Voting Models with Single Mindedness Theory. The goal is to find an equivalent expression to the Ramsey’s rule for a political economy environment where Governments are assumed to be Leviathans rather than...

This paper examines the social opportunity cost of a hypothetical public project in Australia and compares these values with the cost of the project as measured by factor prices. Since 2001, the Australian taxation system has included an ad valorem tax, the Goods and Services Tax, however...

We find that the contemporary version of the dynamic Ramsey problem omits one important variable that we take into consideration in this paper. The effect of introducing of this variable into the analysis of dynamic inconsistency is similar to that of introducing expected inflation into the...