Governments often provide their citizens with goods and services that are also supplied in markets: education, housing, nutritional assistance, etc. We analyze the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social image. We show that image...

The sociologist R. Dahrendorf has recently suggested that there is no and there ought to be no convergence of economic policies towards some common ideal model. On the contrary, he states that `diversity is [...] at the very heart of a world that has abandoned the need for closed, encompassing...

Pareto optimality is a concept in economics that deals with optimum condition of resource distribution. James Buchanan in his essay extended the idea into the political realm to understand how unanimous consensus is reached. This essay attempts to examine whether he was justified in using the...

We analyze the political economy of the public provision of private goods when individuals care about their social status. Status concerns motivate richer individuals to vote for the public provision of goods they themselves buy in markets: a higher provision level attracts more individuals to...