A class of inequality measures that is a natural companion to the popular Lorenz curve is the class of measures that are linear in incomes. These measures, which include the Gini and S-Gini coefficients, can be interpreted as ethical means of relative deprivation feelings. Their change through...

This proposal involves the establishment of ‘welfare accounts’ for every person in a country. There are four accounts: a retirement account (covering pensions), an unemployment account (covering unemployment support), a human capital account (covering education and training), and a health...

Venture capitalists provide risk capital and valuable monitoring services that are essential for the success of upstart companies. The financial sector’s expertise in monitoring investment proposals may increase with the accumulated experience in funding such projects. In the other direction,...

Regional flows of federal taxes and transfers within the United States and Canada are used to analyse long-term fiscal flows (the redistributive element) and short-term responses to regional business cycles (the stabilization element). In the United States, long-run flows amount to 22 cents in...

We study the political economy of social insurance in a world where individuals differ in both income and risk. Social insurance is financed through distortionary taxation and redistributes across income and risk. Individuals vote on social insurance that they can complement with insurance...

Despite the growing concern about actual on-going climate change, there is little consensus about the scale and timing of actions needed to stabilise the concentrations of greenhouse gases. Many countries are unwilling to implement effective mitigation strategies, at least in the short-term, and...

It is observed in the real world that taxes matter for location decisions and that multinationals shift profits by transfer pricing. The US and Canada use Formula Apportionment (FA) to tax corporate income, and the EU is debating a switch from Separate Accounting (SA) to FA. This paper develops...

This Paper analyses whether different emission trading regimes provide different incentives to participate in a cooperative climate agreement. Different incentive structures are discussed for those countries, namely the US, Russia and China, that are most important in the climate negotiation...

This Paper elaborates on the recent race to sequence the human genome. Starting from the debate arising from the genome case on public versus private research, the Paper shows that in some fundamental research areas, where knowledge externalities play an important role, market and non-market...

Alamar and Glantz interpret smoking in restaurants as a market failure, and they claim that restaurants should welcome government laws that disallow smoking in all restaurants. Contrary to their claims, restaurant owners do have an incentive to eliminate smoking if doing so raises the value of...