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...

This Paper deals with collective decision making within a group of independent jurisdictions. The right to choose the public policy is delegated from the central authority of one of the jurisdictions through a bidding procedure among the group members. We identify the following trade-off:...

This paper examines the role of national identity in sustaining public support for the welfare state. Liberal nationalist theorists argue that social justice will always be easier to achieve in states with strong national identities which, they contend, can both mitigate opposition to...

Almost all previous studies on public policy under relative consumption concerns have ignored the role of leisure for status comparisons. Inspired by Veblen (1899), this paper considers a two-type optimal income tax model, where people care about their relative consumption, and where the...

Canadian provincial governments have broad authority to impose direct taxes by passing enabling legislation in their respective legislatures. Governments may also use regulation to set fees, for example, to recover the cost of services they provide, but cannot use regulation to impose taxes that...

This paper analyses the anti-corruption activities of 24 transition countries in the period 1999-2002. These activities are divided into omnibus anti-corruption programmes, legislative reform aimed at tackling corruption, and adherence to international anti-corruption conventions. The paper...

The current wave of PPPs in developing economies was not determined by an endogenous process; on the contrary, it was due to a coincidence of interests between international organizations that shared the view of the Washington Consensus and a set of countries that have considered divestiture the...

Informal payments are a frequently overlooked source of local public finance in developing countries. We use microdata from ten countries to establish stylized facts on the magnitude, form, and distributional implications of this "informal taxation." Informal taxation is widespread, particularly...

We use a limited information environment to mimic the state of confusion in an experimental, repeated public goods game. The results show that reinforcement learning leads to dynamics similar to those observed in standard public goods games. However, closer inspection shows that individual decay...