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2015, Economics Letters
h i g h l i g h t s • We develop a theoretical model with heterogeneous agents that differ in income. • We focus on two alternative public choice mechanisms. • We show that static inefficiency depends on the public choice mechanism. • We show that it depends also on the income elasticity of the public good. • We show that a trade-off may be at work between static and dynamic (in)efficiency.
Journal of Public Economics, 2005
This paper argues that, in models with heterogeneous agents, the concept of the marginal cost of public funds (MCPF) will only be useful if it is compared with an analogous concept for the benefit side. The MCPF does not assume a unique value and is not particularly illuminating in and out of itself. Also gone is the benchmark status of MCPF = 1. Turning to the provision of public goods, using a mechanism design approach, the paper constructs a two-stage proof for Kaplow's [Kaplow, L., 1996. The optimal supply of public goods and the distortionary cost of taxation. National Tax Journal 49, 513-533.] proposition concerning the birrelevanceQ of labor supply and distributional concerns in public good provision. This highlights the two fundamental ingredients for his result. First, the provision of public goods per se, when it satisfies the Samuelson's rule, is only potentially Pareto-improving. Second, the actual Pareto improvement will materialize when, or if, one reforms the income tax structure. If the reform is not forthcoming, the decision on public goods provision must rely on redistributional concerns. Finally, the paper generalizes Broadway and Keen's [Boadway, R., Keen, M., 1993. Public goods, self-selection and optimal income taxation. International Economic Review 34, 463-478.] result to a model with many types of agents, many private goods and without making any assumptions regarding which self-selection constraints are or are not binding.
We extend the model of Schultz (1996) to a dynamic setting with no policy com- mitment. Two parties that compete for election must choose the level of provision of a public good as well as the tax payment needed to finance it. The cost of producing the good may be high or low and this information is not known to the voters. We show that there exists an equilibrium in which the party that does not want much of the public good uses the inefficient (high cost) technology even though the efficient one is available. Using the low cost technology would, by informing the voters about the cost parameter, force it to produce an excessively high level of the good in the future. Interestingly, this equilibrium is not symmetric, suggesting that a party with a strong taste for the public good is less likely to adopt a wasteful policy.
2006
We extend the model of to a dynamic setting with no policy commitment. Two parties that compete for election must choose the level of provision of a public good as well as the tax payment needed to finance it. The cost of producing the good may be high or low and this information is not known to the voters. We show that there exists an equilibrium in which the party that does not want much of the public good uses the inefficient (high cost) technology even though the efficient one is available. Using the low cost technology would, by informing the voters about the cost parameter, force it to produce an excessively high level of the good in the future. Interestingly, this equilibrium is not symmetric, suggesting that a party with a strong taste for the public good is less likely to adopt a wasteful policy.
The Canadian Journal of Economics, 1989
This volume is a selection of papers presented at a seminar in public economics, Bad Neresheim 1986. We gratefully acknowledge financial support by the Hanns Martin Sch1eyer-Stiftung and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
Economics Letters, 2012
We extend Bergstrom and Cornes (1983) to show that for strong independence of efficient allocations from distribution in a public goods economy, the utility functions of all consumers must identically be of the form: A (Y) X i , where Y and X i are respectively the quantities of public good and private good for consumer i, and A(•) is some arbitrary function. This implies that for an economy with heterogeneous consumer preferences, it is impossible to ensure that any redistribution of private goods will remain efficient, especially for boundary Pareto optima.
Social Choice and Welfare, 2012
We show that efficient anonymous incentive compatible (dominant strategy) mechanisms for public goods eliminate externalities, i.e., each individual is unable to influence the welfare of anyone else. The characterization applies whether preferences are quasilinear or ordinal and public goods are costless or costly. The characterization is used to derive existence and non-existence results for models with a finite number of individuals and to explain existence results in the continuum. With public goods, elimination of externalities implies that individuals can have no effect at all. Hence, such mechanisms provide only weak incentives for truth-telling. Comparisons with the no externality characterization for private goods are also included.
Self-selecting households consume an excludable public good via enabling expenditures-e.g, on TVs and licence fees for broadcasting. We characterise voluntary consumers at an arbitrary all-or-nothing price, and the optimal price a revenue-constrained welfare-maximiser facing voluntary consumers chooses. These are compared with those from universal provision of the public good via a uniform tax. We show that, inter alia, demand for the good might increase with price; self-selection will produce under-provision. Numerical welfare comparisons show that either mandatory or voluntary participation can be superior, depending on society's income dispersion and inequality aversion.
American Economic Review, 2000
________________________________________ Financial Support from the Swiss National Science Foundation (project number 12-43590.95) is gratefully acknowledged. We also would like to thank two anonymous referees and the editor in charge for their helpful comments. Comments by Jim Andreoni and Axel Ockenfels, by seminar participants at Berkeley, Frankfurt, MIT, Regensburg, Zurich, at the Workshop for Experimental Economics at Rauischholzhausen and at the European Economic Association Meeting in Prague, the ESA Meeting in Houston and the ASSA Meeting in San Francisco and the Meeting of the Verein für Socialpolitik in Rostock are also gratefully acknowledged. Valuable research assistance has been provided by Katja Cavalleri and Beatrice Zanella. We are particularly grateful to Urs Fischbacher for writing the computer program.
The aim of this paper is to develop a model that includes two tiers of government providing public goods with the same tax base to finance them. Their rent is related to the level of competition. Citizens maximize their own utility starting from these different levels of competition. Therefore, they can decide to turn down the governments to induce them to behave efficiently. Moreover, governments can choose whether to accept the behaviour urged by citizens or to maximize their rent for a single period of office and consequently lose the next elections.
Journal of Public Economic Theory, 2007
We consider a dynamic setting with no policy commitment. Two parties that compete for election must choose the level of provision of a public good as well as the tax payment needed to finance it. The cost of producing the good may be high or low and this information is not known to the voters. We show that there exists an equilibrium in which the party that does not want much of the public good uses the inefficient (high cost) technology even though the efficient one is available. Using the low cost technology would, by informing the voters about the cost parameter, force it to produce an excessively high level of the good in the future. Interestingly, this equilibrium is not symmetric, suggesting that a party with a strong taste for the public good is less likely to adopt a wasteful policy.
Econometrica, 1978
Journal of Public Economics, 1984
This paper presents a characterization of Lindahl allocations which makes no reference to personalized prices. Lindahl equilibria are characterized here by two conditions: Pareto efficiency and a voluntariness condition. Voluntariness requires that no consumer may benefit from a reduction in his contribution if this means that the vector of public goods must be reduced in the same proportion. The intersection of the (large) set of voluntary allocations and that of efficient ones turns out to be (under differentiability) the set of Lindahl allocations.
2011
We examine how the relation between individual and social utility affect the efficiency of game-theoretic solution concepts. We first provide general results for monotone utility-maximization games, showing that if each player's utility is at least his marginal contribution to the welfare, then the social welfare in any Strong Nash Equilibrium is at least half of the optimal. The efficiency degrades smoothly as the marginal contribution assumption is relaxed. For non-monotone utility maximization games, we manage to give efficiency results if the game is also a potential game. We also extend previous results on efficiency of Nash Equilibria for the case when social welfare is submodular.
Review Economic Design, 2004
We study a continuous and balanced mechanism that is capable of implementing in Nash equilibrium all the Pareto-efficient individually rational allocations for an economy with public goods. The Government chooses a set of weights directly related to the Lindahl prices corresponding to the Pareto-efficient allocation it wants to implement. The mechanism then guarantees that initial endowments are re-allocated so that the chosen vector of Lindahl prices is indeed a Lindahl equilibrium, and implements the corresponding Lindahl allocation.
Journal of Public Economics, 1991
This paper sets out conditions for the optimal public provision of in-kind transfers. Rules are derived governing their marginal and optimal use in the presence of linear taxes. Because of the difficulty of using these conditions to examine what impact optimal transfers would have on optimal tax systems, a simple two-good simulation model is used to illustrate the problem.
European Journal of Political Economy, 2014
We study the differences between public production and public finance of public goods in a dynamic general equilibrium model. Under public production, public goods are produced by the government. Under public finance, the same amount of public goods is produced by costminimizing private providers with the government financing their costs. When the model is solved numerically using fiscal data from the UK, a switch from public production to public finance has substantial aggregate and distributional implications. Public providers cannot beat private providers, in terms of productive efficiency, even if they both act as cost minimizers. The following mix of reforms is found to be Pareto improving: (i) a transition to cost-minimizing private providers that allows the government to achieve efficiency savings, (ii) a reduction in distorting income taxes made affordable by these efficiency savings, and (iii) a mechanism to compensate the ex public employees. All these results hold if private producers use a more capital intensive production technology than public producers, or, even in the case in which they use the same technology, if capital is a relatively important productive factor quantitatively.
The aim of this paper is to develop a model that considers the existence of two tiers of government providing public goods with the same tax base to finance them. Their rent is related to the level of competition. Citizens need to maximize their own utility starting from these different levels of competition. Therefore, they can decide to turn down the governments to induce them to behave efficiently. Moreover, governments can choose whether to accept the behaviour proposed by citizens or to maximize their rent for a single period of office of the legislature and consequently loose the next elections.
Journal of Public Economic Theory, 2007
We extend the model of voluntary contributions to multiple public goods by allowing for bundling of the public goods. Specifically, we study the case where agents contribute into a common pool which is then allocated towards the financing of two pure public goods. We explore the welfare implications of allowing for such bundling vis-a-vis a separate contributions scheme. We show that when agents have homogeneous preferences, they cannot be made better off with a bundling scheme. On the contrary, in the generic case when agents are heterogenous in their incomes and preferences, bundling may increase joint welfare compared to a separate contribution scheme, in particular for higher income inequality among the agents. It is interesting to note that the welfare improvement occurs despite a decrease in total contributions. Our findings have implications for the design of charitable institutions and international aid agencies.
Experimental Economics, 2011
The impact of redistributive policies on voluntary contributions is still not well understood. While a higher level of redistributive taxation decreases the price of voluntary giving, it also changes the income distribution by decreasing income inequality. This paper provides a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the net impact of the tax rate on public goods provision. The experimental findings show that while the participants decrease their voluntary contributions as the pre-tax income distribution becomes more equal, they increase their contributions with taxation. These findings have important implications for government policies regarding privately provided public goods.
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