A pay-as-you-go pension scheme is associated with positive externalities of having children and providing them with human capital. In a framework with heterogeneity in productivity, and stochastic and endogenous investment in fertility and education, we discuss internalization policies...

We show that the optimal property tax rate rises with the ratio of land rents to structure and land development costs. California's high ratio of income to property tax revenue and the distribution of Federal housing subsidies thus appear geographically misplaced. Proportional taxation of...

This paper investigates the effect of labor immigration on public pensions when wage setting by a centralized trade union leads to unemployment. It is shown that immigration improves the financial soundness of pay-as-you-go pensions if and only if it diminishes total employment. This occurs if...

Production capital and technology, fundamental to understanding output and productivity growth, are unobserved except at disaggregated levels and must be estimated prior to being used in empirical analysis. We develop and apply a new estimation method, based on advances in economics, statistics,...

In this paper we develop a micro ecosystem model whose basic entities are representative organisms which behave as if maximizing their net offspring under constraints. Net offspring is increasing in prey biomass intake, declining in the loss of own biomass to predators and Allee's Law applies....

Leaders compensate supporters not just for performing their duties but also in order to preempt an overthrow by the same supporters. We show how succession rules affect the power of leaders relative to supporters as well as the resources expended on possible succession struggles. We compare two...

The Lindahl equilibrium is mostly motivated by a rather artificial price mechanism. Even though the analogy to a competitive market has been emphasised by Lindahl himself his approach does not directly explain the normative ideas, which are behind this concept. In the present paper we therefore...

We characterize the equilibrium of a search model with a continuum of job and worker types, wage bargaining, free entry of vacancies and on-the-job search. The decentralized economy with monopsonistic wage setting yields too many vacancies and hence too low unemployment compared to first best....

With fixed costs of price and quantity adjustment, output effects of inflation depend on the elasticity of the firm's marginal real revenue. If the elasticity always exceeds minus unity, then output decreases with inflation, while if the elasticity is always less than minus unity, then output...

The paper analyzes the optimal structure of the board of directors in a firm with a large shareholder sitting on the board. In a one-tier structure the sole board performs all tasks, while in a two-tier structure the management board is in charge of project selection and the supervisory board is...