When productivity is fostered by an individual's own human capital as well as by the economy-wide average level of human capital, individuals under-invest in human capital. The provision of subsidies for the formation of human capital, conditional on the subsidy being self-financed by tax...

We propose a new microeconomic explanation for the divergent experiences of economies in forming human capital. We suggest that the positive effect of a longer life expectancy on human capital formation arises from two separate effects: a life-expectancy effect and a prolonged intergenerational...

In this paper we study the welfare effect of a monopoly innovation. Unlike many partial equilibrium models carried out in previous studies, general equilibrium models with non-price-taking behavior are constructed and analyzed in greater detail. We discover that technical innovation carried out...

When risks are interdependent, loss-prevention activities of one agent influence the risks faced by others. The social return to an investment in loss-prevention is greater than the private return. From a perspective of social welfare, the market allocation is not optimal and leads to...

This paper studies the impact of tax-financed universal health coverage schemes on macroeconomic aspects of labor supply, asset holding, inequality, and welfare, while taking into account features common to developing economies, such as informal employment and tax avoidance, by constructing a...

We consider a symmetric three-stage game played by a pair of regulator-firm hierarchies to capture the scale and technology effects. Each firm produces one good sold on the market. The production process generates pollution characterized by a fixed emission/output ratio, and cross-borders. Firms...

We propose a general framework to unambiguously compare distributions functions in an economically interpretable way. Our framework provides complete ranking of any set of distributions and money metric interpretation of the social welfare level of a dominating distribution as compared to a...

We investigate the impact on social welfare of the UK policy introduced in 1980 by which public housing tenants (council housing in UK parlance) had the right to purchase their houses at heavily discounted prices. This was known as the Right to Buy (RTB) policy. Although this...

We propose a new welfare criterion that allows us to rank alternative financial market structures in the presence of belief heterogeneity. We analyze economies with complete and incomplete financial markets and/or restricted trading possibilities in the form of borrowing limits or transaction...

The traditional concept of a strict minimum of nontaxable income equal for all taxpayers embedded in most current income-tax systems is the result of a paradox of fiscal egalitarianism. The paper shows that substituting the traditional notion of a strict minimum of nontaxable income for a scheme...