In a simple model of day care enrollment and labor supply, we have shown that in countries like Sweden where wages are taxed at about 60\%, the government's tax revenue, net of day care subsidies, is likely to be maximized with subsidies covering more than half of day care costs. In contrast, in...

This paper seeks useful conditions relating individual preferences to willingness to support specific governmental tax-expenditure proposals. This discussion follows Wicksell in considering only tax-expenditure proposals that specifically tie expenditures to taxes that finance them.

How should benefit-cost analysis account for the value that benevolent individuals place on other people's pleasure from public goods? When adding up the benefits to be compared with costs, should we sum the private valuations, the altruistic valuations, or something else? This paper proposes a...