In economies with public goods, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of cost monotonic selections from the set of Pareto optimal and individually rational allocations. Such selections exist if and only if the preferences of the agents satisfy what we call the equal...

In economies with public goods, and agents with quasi-linear preferences, we give a characterization of the welfare egalitarian correspondence in terms of three axioms: Pareto optimality, symmetry and solidarity. This last property requires that an improvement in the ability to exploit the...

This paper presents a model of nation formation in which culturally heterogeneous agents vote on the optimal level of public spending. Larger nations benefit from increasing returns in the provision of public goods, but bear the costs of greater cultural heterogeneity. This tradeoff induces...