House prices have increased significantly in Canada over the past decade, driving household debt and residential construction activity to historical highs. Although macro-prudential tightening has slowed the pace of household borrowing in the last few years, house prices have continued to trend...

Finnish municipalities enjoy ample fiscal autonomy and provide or arrange the provision of a large share of public services. In recent years, their spending and debt has been increasing steadily, especially because of population ageing and increases in the cost of health care and social...

This paper investigates the politicians �incentives to pursue income redistribution when governments are constrained to levy taxes on labor income and this creates distortions. Politicians who strive to be elected may strategically redistribute through in-kind rather than cash transfers and...

Using the self-selection framework developed by Stiglitz (1982, 1987) and Stern (1982), the paper reconsiders the issue of the desirability of public provision of private goods in a simple two-class economy where wages are endogenous and the policymaker has access to what is commonly known as...

The article discusses the possible cost savings of contracting out refuse collection in the Netherlands. According to foreign econometric studies, contracting out refuse collection leads to cost savings of approximately 20%. Our findings indicate that similar cost savings apply to the...

We analyze the optimality of alternative mechanisms of public provision of private goods affecting the productive capacity of households (e.g. education, health-care) rather than directly their welfare. Opting out mechanisms - often considered a tool to focus social expenditure - are proven to...

The compensated taxable income elasticity at a given income level is proportional to the number of individuals who bunch at a convex kink point. This holds true even in the presence of optimization frictions if the jump in marginal tax rates is suciently large. In this paper we estimate bunching...

A link between social insurance and education policy is explored. Due to moral hazard full insurance against disability is not feasible. When high- and low-risk individuals can be identified, second-best social insurance system entails cross-subsidies from the low-risk group to the high-risk...

This paper studies the relation between Bayesian mechanism design and the Ramsey-Boiteux approach to the provision and pricing of excludable public goods. For a large economy with private information about individual preferences, the two approaches are shown to be equivalent if and only if, in...

The article discusses the possible cost savings of contracting out refuse collection in the Netherlands. According to foreign econometric studies, contracting out refuse collection leads to cost savings of approximately 20%. Our findings indicate that similar cost savings apply to the...