Fighting poverty is one of the main goals in the most societies. This is usually done by the transferring resources to the poor. There exists a widespread view that the European countries are more generous to the poor than the United States. We study whether this is really the case. Firts we...

Consider a “linear world” populated by several agents. These agents’ locations are identified with optimal variety of a horizontally differentiated local public good. Agents are to be partitioned into several communities (hereafter, groups), and each group chooses a variety of public good...

The housing market in Spain has been subject to substantial upheavals over the past two decades. House prices have risen sharply, making it extremely difficult for large sectors of the population to have access to housing. This study has been carried out from the standpoint of the objective of...

The theoretical analysis of public expenditure is usually carried out within a First-Best (FB) frame work, where the social planner is assumed to be perfectly informed. As a consequence, economic policy implications are not very relevant in practice, because the real world (which is typically an...

The aim of this study is to estimate the redistributive, stabiliser and insurance effects at territorial level of the federal budget of Australia, Spain, the USA and of the European Union. This analysis is carried out for the budget as a whole through regional fiscal balances and, separately for...

The paper provides a new formulation of the Mirrlees-Seade theorem on the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, under weaker assumptions and in a more general model. The formulation of the theorem is independent of whether the model involves finitely many types or a continuous type...

The paper provides a new proof of the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, in a more general model, under weaker assumptions. The analysis focusses on the (weakly) relaxed problem in which upward incentive constraints are replaced by a monotonicity condition on consumption. Without...

In order to analyze conflict and cooperation between a State and a non ruling group in a general equilibrium, I unite pure rent-seeking models and economic models of conflict under an assumption of incomplete property rights. I show that a unique and globally stable Nash equilibrium exists in...

In the presence of Walrasian labor markets social policies harm hours worked, employment and output. In non-Walrasian labor markets with trade unions, efficiency wages and/or costly search and mismatch progressive taxation and corporatism induce wage moderation and boost employment and output....