In a common market with costless mobility of all factors, regional governments can attract mobile firms by granting subsidies which must be financed out of wage taxes on mobile labour. Since firms locate where subsidies are highest and workers settle where taxes are lowest, government are forced...

Several measures of vulnerability to poverty have been suggested in the literature. In practise, only little is known about the robustness of vulnerability comparisons based on these often quite specific measures. The theory of stochastic orders can be applied to shed some light on such issues....

We analyze the interplay of group identity and inter-group conflict in a contest where each of two conflicting groups can develop either a group or an individualistic identity. Contest structures impact on the adoption of identities which themselves influence behavior in the contest. We show the...

The paper analyzes the impact of personal income taxes on strategic business taxation. It sets up a model of tax competition between small jurisdictions whose governments are revenue maximizers and use business taxes on the capital stock and on corporate profits as their policy instruments....

We model a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension system as a series of incomplete intergenerational contracts. Each generation pays a pension to its parents as the price for a premortal transferral of economic property rights. The terms of this intergenerational trade are fixed in a social contract,...

Critical-level (CL) utilitarianism with both fixed and variable critical levels is applied to the problem of redistribution in a federation with free mobility. We are interested in intra-regional inequality when redistribution policies are organized decentrally in a federation. Due to free...

From 2009 to 2011, the Thai government implemented an income guarantee program for rice, tapioca and maize farmers. Essentially, this program added a non-negative but stochastic component to the incomes of registered farmers. We evaluate the impact of the program on risk attitudes and investment...

This note provides an alternative proof for the equivalence of decreasing absolute prudence (DAP) in the expected utility framework and in a two-parametric approach where utility is a function of the mean and the standard deviation. In addition, we elucidate that the equivalence of DAP and the...

We analyse tax competition with corporate profit taxes in a common market where tax revenues are allocated according to an apportionment formula. As a general rule, tax competition is sharper the higher is the tax elasticity of the apportionment formula which, in turn, depends on the properties...