In this paper, we revisit the association between happiness and inequality. We argue that the interaction between the perceived and the actual fairness of the income generation process affects this association. Building on a simple model of individual labor-market participation under...

This paper develops a Mirrlees (1971) framework with heterogeneous agents to analyze optimal redistributive taxes, optimal provision of public goods and the marginal cost of public funds (MCF). Standard MCF measures are shown to suffer from three defects: i) The MCF for the (non-individualized)...

This paper discusses the role of transfers in a non-cooperative environment. If reselling in-kind-transfers involves some retrading costs, in-kind transfers are supposed to realise at least some of the mutual bargaining gains which would be left unexploited by mere use of monetary payments....

It has been argued in the literature that, interjurisdictional competition forces the public sector to increase its efficiency and thus helps to tame Leviathan governments. The paper addresses this hypothesis by means of a simple taxcompetition model with a Leviathan state. It is seen that the...

Thomas Friedman has argued in The World is Flat that those who deny rapid globalization will not survive in the global economy. First, we critically discuss Friedman's views and highlight the new globalization driven by outsourcing and vertical specialization. Second, we argue that Friedman pays...

This paper studies the difference between public production and public finance of public goods in a dynamic general equilibrium setup. By public finance, we mean that the public good is produced by private providers with the government financing their costs. When the model is calibrated to match...

The present study examines empirically the relationship between Happiness and public spending. We use a panel data from 2006 to 2015 for about 132 countries. We first estimated a Pooled, fixed effect and finally a GMM model to deal with the endogeneity problem. Our main findings suggest, first,...

Using a set of innovative instruments we investigate the effect of collectivist culture on fiscal redistribution. Our analysis suggests that societies characterized by less collectivistic culture present higher levels of fiscal redistribution, as proxied by government subsidies and transfers as...

In a school choice problem each school has a priority ordering over the set of students. These priority orderings depend on criteria such as whether a student lives within walking distance or has a sibling already at the school. I argue that by including just the priority orderings in the...

In a school choice problem each school has a priority ordering over the set of students. These priority orderings depend on criteria such as whether a student lives within walking distance or has a sibling already at the school. I argue that by including just the priority orderings in the...