A large share of public funds is spent on private goods (education, health care, day care, etc.). This paper integrates two different approaches to the analysis of public provision of private goods. While normative public economics has established an efficiency case for such provision, the...

The incidence and efficiency losses of taxes have usually been analyzed in isolation from public expenditures. This negligence of the expenditure side may imply a serious misperception of the effects of marginal tax rates. The reason is that part of the marginal tax may in fact be a payment for...

Recent literature on optimal nonlinear taxation has shown that in models with a single level of government public provision of private goods can help redistribution by mitigating self-selection constraints. The aim of the present paper is to extend the analysis to a fiscal federalism setting...

The incidence and efficiency losses of taxes have usually been analysed in isolation from public expenditures. This negligence of the expenditure side may imply a serious misperception of the effects of marginal tax rates. The reason is that part of the marginal tax may in fact be payment for...

The capital management problem posed by R. H. Strotz is analyzed for the case of the naive planner who fails to anticipate changes in his own preferences. By imposing progressively stronger restrictions on the primitives of the problem - namely, the discounting function, the utility index...

In this note, three major areas of Buchanan's research are briefly described: (1) The ideas of Knut Wicksell on Buchanan's work, (2) constitutional economics and the veil of ignorance, and (3) the role of government and/or the power to tax. It is shown that these three areas had a major...

The public distribution system (PDS) has been one of the main policy instruments of the Government of India (GoI) to provide food security to the people of this country, especially the vulnerable ones. The recently enacted National Food Security Act (NFSA), 2013, also relies heavily on it to...

The study revealed the strong impact of policy measures on production, procurement, stocks and trade. We detected several market distortions and mounting fiscal costs. Wheat and rice supply strongly and significantly respond to the minimum support price (MSP). Wholesale prices at planting or...

The National Food Security Act (NFSA) 2013 combines and expands the scope of some existing food-based welfare schemes. It will be distributing raw rations, meal(s) and/or cash. Approximately 81.35 crore persons or 16.57 crore households are to benefit under the targeted public distribution...

We provide a common set of life-cycle earnings statistics using administrative data from the United States, Canada, Denmark and Sweden. Three qualitative patterns are common across countries: (1) the earnings distribution above the median fans out with age, (2) the extreme right tail of the...