One of the main features of health insurance is moral hazard, as defined by Pauly (1968); people face incentives for excess utilization of medical care since they do not pay the full marginal cost for provision. To mitigate the moral hazard problem, a coinsurance can be included in the insurance...

This paper shows that public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals have relative consumption concerns. By providing private goods, governments directly intervene in the consumption structure, thereby having an instrument to...

Non-market techniques are widely used for valuing environmental goods and services. Recent articles obtain results showing respondents to the right of the political spectrum are significantly less likely to vote in favour of environmental programs that provide public goods through public means....

We study how the optimal public provision of health care depends on whether or not individuals have an option to seek publicly financed treatment in other regions. We find that, relative to the first-best solution, the government has an incentive to over-provide health care to low-income...

We study how the optimal public provision of health care depends on whether or not individuals have an option to seek publicly financed treatment in other regions. We find that, relative to the first-best solution, the government has an incentive to over-provide health care to low-income...

This paper examines the impact of social heterogeneity on in-kind redistribution. We contribute to the previous literature in two ways: we consider i) the provision of several public goods and ii) agents different not only in income, but also in their preferences over the various goods provided...

This paper studies the role of public policy to promote efficiency in human capital accumulation in the representative agent framework. Agents accumulate human capital by spending time in home study and in publicly provided schools. The individual faces an aggregate externality in the...

We here expand the static tax competition models in symmetric small regions, which were indicated by Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986) and Wilson (1986), to a dynamic tax competition model in large regions, taking consideration of the regional asymmetry of productivity of public capital and the...

We consider a model in which business public services must be financed with either a source-based tax on mobile capital, such as a property tax, or a tax on production, such as an origin-based VAT and assess which of the two tax instruments is more efficient. In general, both a capital tax and a...

Recent literature on optimal nonlinear taxation has shown that in models with a single level of government public provision of private goods can help redistribution by mitigating self-selection constraints. The aim of the present paper is to extend the analysis to a fiscal federalism setting...