This paper investigates how the heterogenous incomes and preferences of potential donors affect the timing of contribution decisions when it is endogenously determined by contributors themselves. More specifically, we use a simple setting with two donors, Cobb-Douglas preferences, and complete...

In this paper, we study the welfare effects of Christmas presents with a focus on the effect of presents for gift-givers. Based on a survey among students at the University of Göttingen, Germany, we find that the vast majority of gift-givers prefers in-kind gifts compared to gifts of money. The...

How does a public electric utility company optimize its capital budget for grid reliability? We illustrate an economically optimal way to allocate funding these efforts using circuit-level data from Eversource Energy to quantify the benefits to tree trimming treatments over the period of...

Consumption rivalry generates variation in the choice sets individual decision-makers face. When such variation is not taken into account, biased estimates of demand result. Researchers however often lack exact information on temporal variation in product availability and necessarily limit...

We develop a dynamic model of hospital competition where (i) waiting times increase if demand exceeds supply; (ii) patients choose a hospital based in part on waiting times; and (iii) hospitals incur waiting time penalties. We show that, whereas policies based on penalties will lead to lower...

This paper discusses Judge Guido Calabresi's use of the concept of merit goods in his book The Future of Law and Economics (2016). It addresses the following questions: (1) What does Calabresi's conceptualisation of merit good share with the main lines of arguments in the literature for...

This paper looks carefully at situations in which public and private protection are complementary, that is, when private protection must be coordinated with public protection to be effective. For example, home alarms deter theft by being connected to a local police station: if the police do not...

This paper examines the optimal privatization policy in vertically related markets in which an upstream public firm competes with a foreign private rival in supplying a produced input to the domestic and foreign downstream firms in the domestic market. It shows that if the upstream public firm's...

We consider a model in which business public services must be financed with either a source-based tax on mobile capital, such as a property tax, or a tax on production, such as an origin-based VAT and assess which of the two tax instruments is more efficient. In general, both a capital tax and a...

We solve the problem of a representative agent who maximises the expected present utility of his intertemporal consumption under the assumption that an optimal fraction of his wealth is hidden to the tax authorities (we show conditions under which evasion is expedient). Evasion affects the...