When deciding on the social desirability of public investment, the cost of a project is sometimes adjusted by a factor known as the Marginal Cost of Public Funds (MCPF) which captures the cost of raising public funds through distortionary taxation. However, there is no scholarly consensus on...

Should public assets such as infrastructure, education, and the environment earn the same return as private investments? The long-term nature of public investments provides commitment to current preferences, which justifies lower than private returns for time-inconsistent decision markers. An...

High rates of government investment in public sector capital forecast high risk premiums both at the aggregate and firm-level. This result is in sharp contrast with the well-documented negative relationship between the private sector investment rate and risk premiums. To explain the empirical...

This paper studies the effects of asymmetries in re-election probabilities across parties on public policy and its subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between opposing groups – that disagree on the composition of public consumption – results in governments being endogenously...

This paper studies the effects of asymmetries in re-election probabilities across parties on public policy and their subsequent propagation to the economy. The struggle between groups that disagree on targeted public spending (e.g., pork) results in governments being endogenously short-sighted:...

This paper considers an endogenous growth model with public capital and government debt. In setting the level of public investment each period, the government is assumed to follow two fiscal rules that are commonly used in the growth literature: public investment is either equal to a constant...

This paper incorporates the notion of public capital in a Blanchard OLG model to study the effects of debt-financed public investments on growth and welfare in the long-run. The simple analytic result is that public debt can enhance both welfare and private capital in equilibrium, conditional on...

We use a laboratory experiment to identify the impact of risk in the private and public dimensions of social investments. In variants of a public good game, we separate the return a subject's investment generates for herself vs. the return to others. We find a detrimental effect of risk on...

We empirically analyze the effect of political support for the government on voluntary tax compliance. To this end, we use 33 survey results of the contingent valuation (CV) method developed and widely used for the valuation of non-market goods in the field of environmental economics. The degree...

We model investors that take into account the amount of public good that firms produce (e.g., by reducing carbon emissions) when making their portfolio allocation. In an equilibrium asset pricing model with production and public goods provision, we find that environmentally conscious investors...