The payment of zakat by the owners of wealth is one of the five pillars of Islam. Many countries operate with no enforcement of the obligation to pay, making zakat a form of voluntary redistribution. We analyze how zakat affects capital accumulation in a model that explicitly recognizes the...

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is one of the most popular multi-attribute decision aid methods. However, results depend on the preference measurement sacle and the aggregation technique used. In this paper, we describe a decision problem with an inherent trade-off between two criteria. A...

Recent work has shown that a system of equalization grants can limit tax competition among lower-level governments. The structure of such models, however, does not allow for the federal to be an active player but its role is being limited in the administration of the equalization grants. The...

This paper investigates the implications of vertical fiscal externalities for the optimal federal tax and the sign of fiscal gap in the presence of ad valorem taxation. It is shown that the federal government can always achieve the second-best optimum for public good provision. The sign of the...

We propose a set of comprehensive axioms that seek to capture our intuitive understanding of the properties of an emission-generating technology (EGT). We show that an EGT that satises these axioms can be parametrically represented by more than one implicit production function that are derived...

In this paper, we consider a model where producers set their prices based on their prediction of the aggregated price level and an exogenous variable, which can be a demand or a cost-push shock. To form their expectations, they use OLS-type econometric learning with bounded memory. We show that...

We study the role of village-level religious fragmentation on intra- and inter-group cooperation in India. We report on data on two-player Prisoners’ Dilemma and Stag Hunt experiments played by 516 Hindu and Muslim participants in rural India. Our treatments are the identity of the two players...

We investigate a new macroprudential policy in a DSGE model with fi?nancial frictions. As Gertler, Kiyotaki and Queralto (2012), we propose to subsidize bank equities. However, our tax rate is different from their policy. The tax rate in our macroprudential policy is proportional to capital...

A by-production-cum-preference based approach is adopted to study the relation between national income and environmental quality under non-cooperative behaviour. While emission is an inferior good for richly endowed economies, it is a normal good for the developing economies. With increases in...

We propose a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) phenomenon in a general model that permits non-smooth preferences and feasible sets and corner solutions for welfare maximisation. These conditions pertain to the relationship between the sets of...