While many theoretical works, particularly in family economics, rely on the transferable utility (TU) assumption, its exact implications in terms of individual preferences have never been fully worked out. In this paper, we provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a group to...

Most of the tax competition literature focuses on the provision of local public services to households. However, a number of papers, dating back to Zodrow and Mieszkowski (1986), analyze tax competition when capital taxes are used to finance local public services provided to businesses,...

It is possible to have income effects on more than one good in utility profiles that lead to Transferable Utility (TU) and in the presence of many private and many public goods. Assuming that the utility functions are of the Generalized Quasi-linear (GQL) form is not necessary for TU to hold. I...

Birth order effects are found in empirical work, but lack theoretical foundations. Our new approach to modelling children provides this. Each child has the same genetic make-up and parents do not favour a child based on its birth order. Each child’s needs change as it grows, and births are...

Consider a two-person economy in which allocative efficiency is independent of distribution but the cardinal properties of the agents' utility functions precludes transferable utility (a property I call “Almost TU”). I show that Almost TU is a necessary and sufficient condition for both...

The income-splitting method of personal income taxation assesses a couple's tax liability by assigning half of the couple's taxable income to each spouse. There is currently a hot debate over whether such a method should be made available to taxpayers in Canada, which has always assessed an...

Consider a two-person economy in which allocative efficiency is independent of distribution but cardinality of the agents' utility functions precludes transferable utility. I show that both agents either benefit or lose with any change of production possibilities under the Nash Bargaining and...

Birth order effects are found in empirical work, but lack solid theoretical foundations in economics. Our new modeling approach to children provides this. Each child’s needs change as it grows, and births are sequential. Each child has the same genetic make-up and parents do not favor one...