This thesis consists of a summary and four self-contained papers. Paper [I] examines whether fathers influence the time their children spend in subsidized child care. Two non-nested models of family child care demand are estimated. The parameter estimates indicate that several characteristics of...

This paper analyzes whether households use house interest deductions to minimize family tax payment. By applying a household model in which tax deductions are associated with a cost, we relate the likelihood of minimizing the tax payment to variables associated with the budget constraint and...

This paper studies the effects of the Swedish child-care fee reform on public expenditures and taxation in the municipalities. The reform implied a common system of child-care fees among all the municipalities and was introduced in 2002. In order to study its effects, we employ a...

This paper develops a dynamic model with endogenous labor supply, savings and health capital, where the consumers differ in ability as well as suffer from a self-control problem generated by quasi-hyperbolic discounting. The purpose is to analyze how a paternalistic government, which implements...

This paper concerns redistribution and public good provision under asymmetric information, which are here ingredients of a policy-problem facing each member state (nation) of an economic federation with decentralized leadership. Each member state is assumed to have its own redistributive policy...

This paper analyzes optimal differential commodity taxation, together with optimal nonlinear income taxation, in order to deal with positional preferences. It also derives the optimal public provision of private goods both when differential commodity taxation is feasible and when it is not. It...