We examine two types of altruism and their implications for voluntary giving. Philanthropists are altruists who wish to enhance the well-being of others, while individuals with merit-good preferences only wish to further the consumption of certain merit goods by others. Philanthropic donors...

We investigate optimal taxation of lifetime income with and without an emigration option during old age. The government sets the rates of deferred taxation and of possibly reduced taxation of interest. If agents are immobile, the optimal policy consists in full deferral of income taxes on...

We argue that societies with a stronger tendency towards postmaterialist life goals tilt the tax structure towards personal income taxes and away from corporate taxation. We provide empirical evidence for this correlation in OECD countries. To address endogeneity issues we then use an...

Economic theory predicts that military conscription is associated with static inefficiencies as well as with dynamic distortions of the accumulation of human and physical capital. Relative to an economy with an all-volunteer force, output levels and growth rates should be lower in countries that...

Contests between groups are plagued by intra-group externalities (freeriding). Yet, costless incentive schemes that entirely avoid free-riding within a group might not be desirable, neither individually nor socially. In contests among two groups, a relatively weak (i.e., small or unproductive)...

A bargaining solution is a social compromise if it is metrically rationalizable, i.e., if it has an optimum (depending on the situation, smallest or largest) distance from some reference point. We explore the workability and the limits of metric rationalization in bargaining theory where...

We analyse how the welfare state, i.e., social insurance that works through redistributive taxation, should respond to increases in risks and to increases in the cost of operating the welfare state. With respect to risks, we distinguish between risks that can be insured and such that cannot...

Several measures of vulnerability to poverty have been suggested in the literature. In practise, only little is known about the robustness of vulnerability comparisons based on these often quite specific measures. The theory of stochastic orders can be applied to shed some light on such issues....