This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of consumer credit conditions in an incomplete-market, general equilibrium model where households hold unsecured debt, and firms use labor. I show that consumer finance disturbances can cause business cycle fluctuations through a rich interplay...

In this paper, I study welfare aspects of inter vivos giving in general equilibrium by modeling joy of giving in an overlapping generations model. The welfare aspects are explained by the long-run results from numerical experiments with different gift tax rules in the model economy, which is...

Our study demonstrates how agents' expectations can interact dynamically with monetary and fiscal policy at the zero lower bound. We study expectation formation near the zero lower bound using a learning-to-forecast laboratory experiment under alternative policy regimes. In our experimental...

Humans cooperate a great deal in economic activity, but our two major models of equilibrium – Walrasian competitive in markets and Nash in games – portray us as only non-cooperative. In earlier work, I have proposed a model of cooperative decision making (Kantian optimization); here, I embed...

Many consumers care about climate change and other externalities associated with their purchases. We analyze the behavior and market effects of such "socially responsible consumers" in three parts. First, we develop a flexible theoretical framework to study competitive equilibria with rational...

We take into account that envy (relative consumption concerns) is more pronounced in the present than in the future. We consider a Ramsey-type model in which agents differ only in their initial capital endowments but are identical in their exogenous parameters. Agents' preferences exhibit...

We extend the seminal model by Bergstrom, Blume and Varian (1986) on the private provision of public goods to contributions given by multiple private commodities. Taking into account the proportion of the value of the aggregate endowment donated to finance the public good, we present a notion of...

We analyze risk sharing and fiscal spending in a two-region model with sequentially complete markets. Fiscal policy is determined by majority voting. When policy setting is decentralized, regions choose pro-cyclical fiscal spending in an attempt to manipulate security prices to their benefit....

We analyze the choices between two technologies A and B that both exhibit network effects. We introduce a critical mass game in which coordination on either one of the standards constitutes a Nash equilibrium outcome while coordination on standard B is assumed to be payoff-dominant. We present a...