Previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure comparisons. This paper considers a two-type optimal nonlinear income tax model where people care both about their relative consumption and their relative leisure. Increased consumption...

This paper describes a new method for solving non-standard constrained optimization problems for which standard methodologies do not work properly. Our method (the Rational Iterative Multisection -RIM- algorithm) consists of different stages that can be interpreted as different requirements of...

Earlier literature on tax competition and policy coordination typically assumes that the labor market is competitive; a description less suitable for Europe, where trade unions have had a strong position in the labor market for a long time. This paper concerns factor income taxation and public...

Kaplow (1996) and others argue forcefully in favor of using the standard cost-benefit test alone, without any distributional concern, given “standard simplifying assumptions.” This paper, on the contrary, demonstrates that distributional weights, equal to the social marginal utility of...

This paper concerns optimal factor income taxation and provision of a public good in a small open economy, which is characterized by union wage setting. The analysis is based on a general equilibrium model, where the hours of work are endogenous, and the tax instruments are linear taxes on labor...

The implications of more environmental concern for the optimal provision of public goods, taxation, environmental policy and involuntary unemployment are derived within a second-best framework in which lump-sum taxes and subsidies are not available and labour supply is rationed due to a rigid...

From an analitycal historical perspective, this paper deals with the important public finance issue of decentralizing the government’s economic activities and functions into distinct branches, respectively devoted to collecting taxes and to allocating a given budget to different public goods....

A significant part of the revenue in the EU budget is raised via a GNI-based resource. The purpose of this paper is to analyze how this way of raising funds to the central authority in an economic federation affects the tax policy implemented by the lower level jurisdictions. This question is...

This paper shows how the first-best and second-best rules for optimal public good provision depend on the adaptation to private and public consumption. Adaptation in private consumption typically leads to over-provision relative to the Samuelson condition, while adaptation in public consumption...

This paper describes a new method for solving non-regular constrained optimization problems when standard methodologies do not work properly. Our method (the Rational Iterative Multisection Procedure, RIMP) consists of different stages that can be interpreted as different requirements of...