Journal of Public Economic Theory最新文献

An increase in the number of local jurisdictions providing industrial public goods may lead to a rise in the equilibrium tax rate, in contrast to the case of residential public goods. When local jurisdictions are Leviathans, an increase in competition may expand tax revenues and thus fail to tame the Leviathan, contrary to the conventional wisdom.

If, for all prices, income distribution is optimal for a planner with a social welfare function, then aggregate demand is the same as that of a single “representative consumer” whose preferences over aggregate consumption are the same as the planner's. This paper shows that the converse is false. Aggregate demand may be the demand function of a representative consumer although the income distribution is not optimal for any social welfare function. The representative consumer may be Pareto inconsistent, preferring situation A to B when all the actual consumers prefer B to A. We give conditions under which existence of a representative consumer implies that the income distribution satisfies first order conditions for optimality. Satisfying the first order optimality conditions for an additively separable social welfare function is essentially equivalent to aggregate demand for every pair of consumers having a symmetric Slutsky matrix.

We study the impact of environmental regulation on the transfer of a clean technology where bureaucrats are needed for government intervention. In the absence of corruption, when environmental taxes are low, a technology transfer always takes place and it increases total outputs, but may lead to higher pollution levels. However, when corruption is possible, a firm with a dirty technology may choose to bribe a corruptible bureaucrat who will underreport the actual level of emissions, thereby hindering the transfer of clean technology. We show that a less strict anticorruption policy may lead to more bribing, but encourage technology transfers. Moreover, an environment-oriented government would set a deterrent environmental tax to reduce pollution, while an output-oriented government would set a minimum tax rate to eliminate corruption and induce technology transfers. However, a balanced government would tolerate corruption when the cost of bribing is low and the clean technology is sufficiently efficient.

The paper examines candidates' choice between policies that increase the number of supporters and policies that foster their participation. Voter turnout is decided at the group level, in response to candidates' policies. A convex utility function captures the alienation of citizens who are far from all candidates. In equilibrium, extreme policies are adopted as a mobilization strategy, if citizens are sufficiently polarized and inclined to alienation. Otherwise, a standard result of convergence to the center obtains, in line with the persuasion of the swing voters.

In this paper, we provide a new perspective on the links between the analysis of the voluntary provision of pure and impure public goods. In particular, it is shown that the impure public good model can be transformed into a pure public good one. This innovative method not only leads to new comparative statics results, but also provides new insights on the impure public good model, for example, on causes of the nonneutrality of income transfers with regard to Nash equilibria in the impure public good case.

In this study, the endogenous timing of moves is analyzed in an infinitely repeated game setting of capital tax competition between a subgroup (a tax union) of countries agreeing on partial tax harmonization and outside countries. It is shown that in a subgame perfect equilibrium of the infinitely repeated tax competition game, they simultaneously set capital taxes in every stage game when a tax union comprises similar countries with respect to productivity, whereas they may set capital taxes sequentially in every stage game when a tax union comprises dissimilar countries. This finding is significantly different from Ogawa (2013), although we also assume that capital is owned by the country's residents, as in Ogawa's model. This is because a disadvantaged member country of the tax union would suffer from larger losses when a tax union comprising dissimilar countries, and thus the tax union will choose the strategy of moving Late for the sake of sustaining tax harmonization to avoid such losses.

This paper introduces a pre-election polling stage to Feddersen and Pesendorfer's two-candidate election model in which some voters are uncertain about the state of the world. While Feddersen and Pesendorfer find that less informed, indifferent voters strictly prefer abstention, which they refer to as the swing voter's curse, I show that there exists an equilibrium in which everyone truthfully reveals his or her preference in the pre-election poll and participates in voting. Moreover, even in the truth-telling equilibrium, the candidate who leads in the poll may lose the election. However, polls can help elections aggregate information more successfully.

This paper analyzes the optimal commodity tax policy, in a generalized vertical differentiation model in which consumers have positional considerations. Consumers enjoy having a product which is better than that owned by others, and feel envy when others own a better product than them. We examine the impact of these positional considerations on the optimal tax and welfare when a monopoly produces two variants of such good. The standard result that the government should subsidize the product, can be reversed in our setting. In the presence of positional concerns, the optimal tax rate can be positive. Furthermore, the positional effects determine the level of the tax pass-through on prices. Finally, the tax levied on the high-quality variant affects the price of the low-quality variant and vice versa.

Cultural capital is the term suggested to explain the phenomena that seemingly productivity-irrelevant cultural activities may lead to better economic outcome for individuals. A simple model is proposed to explain the emergence of cultural capital. The cost of acquiring a cultural attribute plays a role in the emergence of cultural capital. The importance of cultural capital is compared between two groups distinguished by a natural attribute. The cultural capital in the economically worse-performing group is more elitist in the sense that a smaller proportion of individuals acquire it due to the higher attainment costs. Welfare implications are also investigated.

The rich literature on Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG)-type pensions provides a notion that when pension return is dominated by the market return, generally it is impossible to phase pension out without hurting any generation. We show that PAYG pensions can indeed be phased out in a much richer framework where fertility is endogenous and general equilibrium effects are present. Interestingly, the factor that helps us to phase the pension out in a Pareto way is hidden in the structure of PAYG pension itself. Individualistic agents fail to recognize the benefits of their fertility decision on these programs and, therefore, end up in an allocation that is strictly dominated by the allocations that internalize this externality. Exploiting this positive externality, competitive economy can improve its allocations and can reach the planner's steady-state in finite time where each generation secures as much utility as in the competitive equilibrium. Clearly, it is possible to transition in a Pareto way to an economy either with no pension or with pensions whose return is not dominated by market return.