This paper concerns optimal taxation and public goods in an economic federation with decentralized leadership, where one lower level government is the first mover also in the horizontal dimension. Under plausible assumptions, horizontal leadership reinforces the incentives created by...

During the latest decades, household mortgage loans have increased substantially in many countries. We develop an OLG model where housing is a positional consumption good (such that housing choices are partly driven by relative consumption concerns), and where the consumers are also...

Following the 1987 report by The World Commission on Environment and Development, the genuine saving has come to play a key role in the context of sustainable development, and the World Bank regularly publishes numbers for genuine saving on a national basis. However, these numbers are typically...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that between-country social comparisons have become more important over time. This paper analyzes optimal income taxation in a multi-country economy, where consumers derive utility from their relative consumption compared with both other domestic residents and...

Economic models of climate policy (or policies to combat other environmental problems) typically neglect psychological adaptation to changing life circumstances. People may adapt or become more sensitive, to different degrees, to a deteriorated environment. The present paper addresses these...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of a publicly provided private good with long-term consequences for individual well-being, in an economy where consumers have present-biased preferences due to quasihyperbolic discounting. The analysis is based on a two-type model with asymmetric...

This paper concerns optimal income taxation in a two-country OLG economy, where each country is characterized by asymmetric information between the government and the private sector, and where one of the countries outsources part of its production to the other. In the country whose firms...

This paper concerns public input provision as an instrument for redistribution under international outsourcing by using a model-economy comprising two countries, North and South, where firms in the North may outsource part of their low-skilled labor intensive production to the South. We consider...

This paper concerns the optimal provision of a state-variable public good, where the global climate is the prime example. The analysis is based on a two-type optimal income tax model with overlapping generations, where people care about their relative consumption. We consider both...